The most unique feature of Magic: The Gathering’s latest set, Reality Fracture, is the presence of the mechanic Empower Jace attached to many cards. This creates a Jace Planeswalker token with two activated abilities: the first spends one loyalty to Surveil one, and the other subtracts three to draw a card.

Before playing in the Reality Fracture early access event hosted on Magic Arena, I was skeptical about the impact of this mechanic in Limited. While Planeswalkers are probably the most powerful card type in Magic, this Jace token doesn’t feel all that impactful on gameplay. After playing a couple dozen games of both Sealed and Draft thanks to early access, I can say I was wrong. Virtually every game of Reality Fracture Limited I played was shaped by the presence of the Jace token — and by how well players were able to optimize this resource.

To understand why Empower Jace is so relevant in Reality Fracture Limited, just keep this in mind: Jace makes every deck better. The mechanic appears across every color, and the Magic designers did a good job balancing it across a variety of cards that play every possible role. You can get a Jace token from an early creature that’s a great blocker like Arcane Amphisbaena , from a removal like No Admittance , from a counterspell like Countersculpt , or from a big spell like Hexhaven Battalion (one of my favorite cards in the set). A Jace token can hit the battlefield at any point during a match.

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