Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1381: Reality Fracture Design with Yoni Skolnik

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

In this podcast, I sit down with Yoni Skolnik, the lead set designer for Reality Fracture, to talk about the set's design.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to rather drive to work at home edition. So mostly I use these to do interviews because it's a lot easier to interview people when they're not in me next to me in a car. So today we have Yanni Skolnik because we're going to talk about

the design of reality fracture. Hey, Yanni. Hello. Hello. So I led the vision design. You led the set design. So this was me starting it and handing it off to you. So let's start Mostly I want to talk about set design today

I had a whole different podcast where I talked about vision design Okay, so the time handing over Let's start with the core thing That we were handing over Which is the paired characters So let's talk a little bit about what that was like I mean that was something we handed off to you

But was a big ask Because the whole set's built around it Yeah Yeah, from the early stages I was always convinced this was you know the most exciting thing So it's a way to get people to see here's both sides of a character at once, and it just being a every pack you get one of these pairs with three legends total,

was such an exciting thing. I remember one of the biggest changes was when you handed it off, we were trying common legendary pairs. I initially thought this would be very helpful to get, to just get a smaller number of legendary cards total, and we had ways to give them, you know, discard abilities from your hands. hand, so you can either discard it for a spell effect, or you can have land cycling on it, so they don't mess up too much with the legend rule.

But as we tested that more and more, we found it was just taking too much of the oomph out of getting to open a brand new pair in every pack when you kept seeing the same common ones over and over again. And so a lot of the iteration around the sheet was around having to make, mostly had to figure out how to have more total legends overall since we couldn't have commons. Yeah, obviously, just to people understand, when we print on a sheet, comments take up more space. That's how they, they, for more frequently. And so the less comments you have, the more space you have to have uncommon, for example.

Mm-hmm. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about designing them. Yeah. What exactly went into designing a paired card, a pair of card? So creatively, my biggest creative concern was always that we want people to understand what's going on pretty quickly and not need to have. a deep history of magic, which meant at the top level, I wanted a lot of these to have very obvious mirroring or alternate stuff. Some of that was mechanical, like one Pia cares about artifacts and one cares about enchantments, or jargol is a nine-free versus a three-nine,

but they also often needed a top-line concept that was like a samurai versus a ninja or a werewolf versus a vampire that were kind of classic examples of duality. So a lot of what the work I did, along with Maris, our world building lead, was making sure that we have characters that are famous for magic, but also great homes for these timeless pairings. What about how many, I know what happened in vision designs, we made a whole bunch, but we sort of just ripped off what we thought was funny and cool to us. And then you worked with creative to sort of make the more official things. How many were even carried over and how many were just brand new during set design? It was probably about half the concepts carried over. The ones that didn't were ones that I felt were more there as nods to deeper magic lore

that we couldn't find really a reason why this would be exciting at the top. Yeah. And the other thing is when we handed over, I think they were all just creatures or just plainswalkers. I know one things you had fun with is like we handed over monocolor, you added into multicol. There's a few examples of things

where there are, one of them isn't a, you know, one of them isn't a creature. Yeah. So for the most part, we liked monocolor ones the most because they have the most, they're the most easy to do

a straightforward telling of the duality. Here's one thing and here's the opposite side in another color. We needed to add we need to find more ways, though, to use the space better, given we had so many uncommon legends. So we added a cycle of enemy legends to represent the five color pairs that aren't in Hexhaven. The Hexhaven color pairs really wanted to be represented by Hex Haven concepts, which meant they wouldn't be on the legendary sheet. So we just added the enemy ones like Edgar and Keora.

And then we also, originally I believe we had the way of the enchantments as cards on creatures, like a creature, would enter empower Jace and give you your Plainswalker tokens and ability. But in order to get more non-creatures in the set, we moved that to be enchantments and we had five of those. And then once we realized we needed to use more space in the sheet, we moved that to be 10 enchantments

so that they could appear on the sheet and be in pairs. Yeah, just so the audience is aware. For example, way of the mind sculptor, this is the Jace one, four in blue, legend or enchantment. When way of the mind sculptor enters, empower Jays five, and we'll get to empower Js in a second, but put five loyalty counters on a JSTOC and you control.

If you don't control one, first create a blue Jays, planeswalker with minus one surveil one and minus three draw card. Whenever you activate a loyal ability, if you remove two or more loyalty counters to activate it, draw a card. So the way they always empower Jace, meaning they played to that mechanic, and they always grant something to Plainswalkers? Mm-hmm.

and yeah, they both let us get some non-creatures onto the sheet, which helped with our as-fans, but also they let us get the Lorwyn-5 onto the sheet where we knew we wanted their main cards because they're mostly Plainswalkers or Creatures to be rarer or mythic as the main characters, but we also needed to make sure they were represented at uncommon as the main characters in the story.

Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about Lowellon 5 real quick. The actually interesting story is, they first planned the story, I believe, um, Jase obviously was the antagonist. Shandra and Lillianna and Ajani, I'm not Johnny and Garrick all played a role. And I think Vraska, obviously, was in the story as well. But a Johnny wasn't in story. And you were a very big advocate of getting a Johnny in the story. So as I remember, I think Garrick was actually the last ad. Oh, no, no, I, I, it was a Johnny because I went through, I just did, uh, I recorded, you guys Oh, you probably already heard this.

I recorded something three years ago when I handed off. And so I trust me of three years ago, you know what I was talking about. But a Johnny was the one we actually added last. My memory was Garrett too. Yeah. And then I heard that, oh, it was actually a Johnny and I Gary. Yes. So once we were so close to having all of them, I really, yeah, was pushing to have the full five.

I think it works really well as kind of an homage to Magic's history up until time spiral block. This set in some ways is a continuation of time spiral block's themes of alternate reality and looking at the history of magic in a different way. The lore and five were introduced right after time spiral and have kind of been the most recognizable faces of the game in the period since. So I think they're both just a really great time tested lineup, but also, you know, if you played for one year and any time in the past 15 years or 20, 19 years at this point, you're familiar of these as important characters. Yeah, and this is the first time.

Because we weren't sure, the quick story behind the scenes is we were going to put some of them in future site. We didn't get done in time. We ended up in Lorwyn. But we weren't confident. We weren't for sure they're going to end up in Lorwyn. So we didn't put them in the story.

Like, we're not going to make a part of the story because we didn't know what's going to happen with them. So even though the Lorwyn 5 are quote-unquote in Lorwyn, they don't show up in the story at all. So they've never appeared in story together before. So this is like, ironically, they're first time with all five appearing in the story together. Yeah.

And a fun fact, while we were in this early stage of reality fracture, I was getting in the last few art pieces for Afer Drift, which took place partially on Murraganda. And in an early draft of the reality fracture, I saw, Garrett was, you know, if they went through recruit Garrick, and he was just hanging out on Maraganda.

And because of that, I was like, oh, can we get an Easter egg in the art of a card where Garrick's just standing in the background. And we did get it on the card March of the World Ouse, where if you look closely at the central Ouse, you see Garrick's silhouette behind the Oos. Oh, that's cool. Yeah.

Okay, so I mentioned Empower J. So let's, I think one of the things about this set is we took some pretty big swings in vision. So one of our big swings, so I had asked the team to riff, and then Yanni was part of the vision design team, by the way. I asked the team, although this I think was during the story,

but I asked the team to riff on existing mechanics, meaning could we make some cool what-if versions of mechanics? And Magic normally does that, so that's not that out of the wild, but I kind of push them to go a little wilder, like do a wild take on a mechanic. And Jeremy, who was my strong second,

created something that at the time he called a mast jace. And the interesting thing about it, And I showed this in my article, if you guys read my article, the three cards he pitched in the very first pitching of the idea, it was Scry, not surveil, but he pitched minus one Scry, minus three, draw a card, and the very, very first version. So it's not often you get things that correct out of the gate. Yeah, it's a fantastic mechanic.

A lot of people are skeptical when they first see it, but basically after anyone he played with it once, they were like, oh yeah, I get it. This makes sense. It's not too weird or too complicated to have essentially common plainswalkers. You know, drawing a card is the most fun mechanic in magic, but making something a cantrip makes it much more powerful. So getting to say you draw one third of a card or two thirds of a card is very useful from a balancing perspective. So what was the challenge with, I mean, obviously we knew we liked it, but what was the challenge for actually making it work? I mean, functionally in a set, what were the challenges?

Yeah, it introduced, you know, definitely a lot of complexity of you get to make a decision and you get to think what am I going, you know, do I attack my opponent's Jace or not? So there's a lot of combat complexity, a lot of combat complexity about what to do with your own Jace and your own turn. We also wanted to grant additional abilities. So you have more options of how to spend your loyalty. You have turned over to turn decisions of, oh, my Jace is at two loyalty. Do I want to minus one? Because that's the only thing I can do or do I want to save it. So if I get more Empower Jace later on, I can draw a full card.

We worried a good deal. At one point, we had a lot of cards that triggered whenever you activated a Plainswalker or whenever you activate a Jace. We found those were pretty problematic because it really rewarded you for sequencing your Jace in a way that you could activate it, you know, minus 1 or minus 3 in a way that makes it go away entirely, and then Empower Jase again to make a new token so you can get two of those triggers at once. and we realized that was two,

two granular sequencing intensive. So we took those cards out. We also added a lot of thought about, is it more interesting to have things? We kind of early decided it was more interesting to empower Jase 2 or 4 since then after you make a move, you still have your Jace around.

But it's a lot simpler to say Empower Jace 1 or 3 because then sometimes you just get your reward and you don't have any lingering complexity afterwards. So we put a lot of thought into where how much one versus two, verse three, verse four we wanted. Yeah, so two other things that one is, I know we talked about this in vision, but did you ever think about not having it a common? Mostly we just found it played well enough and was exciting enough that it worked well at

common. And just the decisions are a lot more interesting when you have enough different things doing it. So it's not, you know, if it's only uncommon, you might only draw one. in a game. And then it doesn't have as many interesting knobs. Yeah, I mean, the decision we made vision, which I just carried through,

was that you sort of can ask the player to learn one new thing. Like, there's one thing you can care about. Like, okay, that is the one thing. And I do want to show that this set is a little light on mechanics in general. I want to talk a little bit about, like, I do think Empower Jace,

used up some of the oxygen and that's why there's not as many mechanics. Yeah, that's definitely part of it. Another part is for the legend sheet. I was a lot more interested in having them stand on their own and look like individually interesting designs. If we had more core mechanics, I think it would have been more important to put them on them.

But as it stood with Empower Jason prepared as kind of our only core mechanics, those could stay on the more Hexsave and Focus cards. and the legend sheet cards could have their own vibes. Okay, let's get into Hex Haven. So, as I talked about this in my previous podcast, we actually started in a couple different places. Very early, we were like, every archetypes its own world.

And then once we decided to stay on one world, originally it was Miriden. And then we decided, Miridon Pure, to be specific. And then we decided that, you know, how many people knew this weird tweak from 15 years ago? And so we came up the idea of doing Hexhaven. And we handed off, Hex Haven was handed off from us. So what were the challenges of bringing alternate Stricksonaven to life? Yeah, first off, I'm super excited that we got to do it.

Like you, Mark, I've always wondered what would the ally schools be like? We were also both the leads on original Strickshaven. So to work together to bring it back was fantastic. I think the main challenge is that it would only be a portion of the set. Strixhaven had two full sets and two sets of commander decks, and it's so flashed out that, you know, in some ways, Hexhaven is going to look very small by comparison. So we had to figure out how to make it feel impactful and memorable

while having very few slots for it. At common and uncommon, I liked the prepared spells being the same, for every school because it gave them a very simple ability to rally around, but also felt like they had something quarter of their identity that could easily define it and communicate it. As soon as you saw, you know, this one hybrid mana to mill yourself for three cards on two different Pyrrix cards, you might not totally get what FierX are about, but you know they care about milling, and that's what your Fierrex deck is going to do.

Yeah, the one thing I like the, the idea of the military feel, I mean, if the, The students were more aligned, meaning they're all going in the same direction. Like we talked about making in Strixhaven, every school has its own token. But here, we purposely did one token, did a cadet token, a two-two cadet token. Because part of the way to not show so much diversity is, well, the school just doesn't have as much diversity. They're there for a very exact mission, which is to help Jays. Yep. Yeah.

So the cadet was a way, we need creature tokens, and they want to represent Hexhaven. but on top of Empower Jace and all these different legends, some of which want bespoke tokens, doing five different tokens wasn't an option. And so I really like that the prepared spells get to feel that core, even if there's only three of them at common uncommon. So let's talk a little bit about prepared at higher rarities. And maybe this will be a segue into a larger what-if conversation.

But talk a little bit about getting to make prepared spells where you can make up the spells. Yeah. We, you know, didn't always have them, but we knew we wanted to try various things during set design process. Definitely the most exciting thing to us was the color shifted iconic spell for which the poster child is bloodline recollector, which casts black ancestral recall and became the headliner of the set. We were trying that out and part of what made us decide to keep it and run with it, was that, you know, the collectibility folks were so excited about us having black ancestral recall as the headliner to counterpart Strixave and having actual ancestral recall on a prepared creature as the headliner. Real quickly, let me say the card for those who don't know it. So the card is called Bloodline Recollector, one in a black for a two-two vampire warlock. At the beginning of each step, if three or more creatures died this turn, this creature becomes prepared. and then the prepared spell is ancestral craving instant for one black mana,

target player draws three cards and loses three life. And so we plan on having a cycle of those. I believe we only ended up with four with Green doing a version of in tomb that instead of getting any card in your graveyard just gets a land, red getting a version of Wheel of Fortune, which just letting yourself draw seven cards is more blue-even red. and red getting high tide, molten tide instead of high tide.

I think that was the final name. White was going to get one. The card Kindren judgment was briefly going to be a prepared spell. But having a sweeper on a creature ended up being not fun for limited. And the Kindred judgment worked well on its original spell. And sorry, if you have to read all these card names out, all these cards now. We'll say, Pyr-Rimer, one red red, red 3-3 elemental sorcerers.

Prowis, this creature enters prepared. It's got molten tide for one red mana instant until end of turn whenever you tap a mountain for mana, add an additional red, red mana. So high tide's a very, very famous old blue spell, which I don't know why it's in blue. I don't even know

why it was thin in blue. But, I mean, they were captured the flavor of a tide, I guess. Yeah. Early magic some times ago, it's very flavorful. Who knows if the color's supposed to do it? So, and then you said, there was there was an

tomb? Yep. The entombed the entom's name was? Cultivator. What? Cultivator? Yeah. Oh, carnivorous cultivator. One in a green, two, three, elf warlock, death touch, this creature enters prepared. When this creature deals combat damage to a player,

return target land card from your graveyard to your hand. And then it's prepared spells en route. Green, sorcery, search your library for a land card, put into your graveyard, than shuffle. And then one minute, you mentioned one more. Oh, that blue one.

What's the wheel of fortune gold? Big question. It's a variable chaser, which has arc of fortune. Variable. Variable chaser, 2U, 2, 3 human wizard, flying prowess,

enters prepared, Arco fortune, two in a blue. Each player may discard their hand and draw seven cards. So one of the challenges, by the way, so what you want to to do with color shift cards, but there's a huge restriction. You have very, very little space to

write the card. And so you had to find cards that just weren't wording. Yep. Yeah. And, you know, sometimes we exactly color shifted it, like molten tide is exactly high tide, but red in mountains. Other times, we, you know, landed on something that changed it a bit more, like in Root only gets lands. So it's kind of strictly worse than in tomb. But it fills the same role. and felt close enough, that it still felt like a good shift. Okay, so let's segue from prepared into just what if in general.

This set was very much about what if. Obviously, we talked about the pairs. That showed what if. But you wanted to play around and not just show what if on the creature cards, but just in larger cards in general. So let's talk a little bit about what we end up calling the Shattered Mears,

which are like rifts where we take cards and show them in different colors. Yeah, so these were for me maybe the most exciting pillar for constructed play, and I took a lot of care. I think we ended up with 13 that these cards would all be exciting

and feel really appropriate to the original card they were riffing on, even though sometimes they'd be quite different of like enlightened confidant is also a one, a two-mana-two-one, but it has lifelink and its ability happens end of turn and it has this surveil hook.

Let me read a Latin Confident. So, Latin Confident is 1 in a white, 2-1, core cleric, LifeLink. At the beginning of your end step, if you gain life this turn, surveil one, if you put a card with man of value less than or equal to the amount of life

you gain this turn into your grade in this way, put that card into your hand. So obviously, dark confidant, Bob Marr Jr. won the invitational many years ago, and I worked with him to design a card and that the card ended up being dark confidant.

And that card, at the beginning of every upkeep, you reveal the top card of your library, and you get a draw, but you lose light equal to the man of value of the card. So talk us through a little bit, like, okay, you're trying to make a white version. What had to be the same one had to be different? Yeah. You know, ultimately it was by feel. There were things that I thought were leaning too far on enlightened confidant,

like giving it a keyword or going to end step that I thought might feel weird to people. But ultimately they tended to accept it as long as it felt like it was trying to capture the spirit of the card and was also exciting from a power level perspective. All the cards that got shattered mirrors treatment were in some way, you know, iconic, well-remembered cards.

Some of them were specifically remembered for being very powerful, like Dark Confidant and Snapcaster Mage. and seasoned pyromancer was even from a modern horizon set, which are known for being particularly powerful. And I directly wanted to allude to that power, but also these had to go for our normal process for standard where we make sure we're comfortable with everything that's hitting standard.

So it's a lot of work to coordinate with play design, get the designs to them ahead of time, making sure that they both feel appropriate in terms of matching the original card, and that they were something we could balance for standard while maintaining that feel. Let's pick one to go through and we'll talk a little bit about making it. So pick... I'll pick Simulacrum Shaper, actually.

Okay. It's just scary. Okay, so Simulacrum Shaper, one green, green, two, two, elf druid. When this creature enters, you may search your library for a basic laying card. Put the card on the battlefield tap, then shuffle. When this creature dies, draw a card. So this one is exactly solemn simulacrum, another invitational card, which is a four-man artifact with the same rules text.

One of my favorite way I found to make a classically powerful card to make it new and still exciting was, oh, a green card can be more powerful than a colorless card. So we can take this classic colorless card, make it green, and suddenly it just gets to be more powerful

even though it's riffing to something that we wouldn't just play and make more powerful. And you're going to make it an elf. All of a sudden, an elf deck should not have this tool and stuff like that. Absolutely. Yeah, that's pretty cool. We'll do one more with another? Yeah, let's see Creesant Crayomancer.

Okay. Okay, so Seasons Crayomancer, one blue, blue, 2-2, human wizard. When this creature enters, draw two cards, then discard two cards. When you discard one or more non-land cards this way, tap up to that many target creatures and put a stunt counter on each of them. Three blue-blue, X-out this card from your graveyard, draw two cards. Yeah, so this is referencing C-Card. season's Pyromancer from the original Modern Horizon sets. The original Modern Horizon set

were made with a higher power level and were intentionally trying to make cards that would hit modern. So we had a very interesting needle to Fred of having this allude to a classically powerful card, but also feel appropriate and standard. And I'm very grateful for play design to entertaining that challenge and working with me on all these. Yeah, these are a lot of fun. I mean, so one of the big things we said very early on was, so time spiral, we had a bunch of cards in time spiral that we called get it cards internally in R&D, which meant, oh, look, we took this card that maybe you don't remember, and took this second card that maybe you don't remember,

and we blended them together, and that unless you're really, really in the weeds of understanding things, it just, it seems like this nonsensical card. And one of our goals here was anything we make needs to be cool and a back, It doesn't have to rely on you knowing something. And I think these cards are good examples of they are cool. If you don't know what cards exist like them, they're still very cool. Yeah, we were trying to be cool in the same way the original card was cool and emulate why that card was successful, not just make a reference to it,

although we're also making a reference to it. So we're almost out of time here. I just wanted to bring up. So there's a few less mechanics. The preparer sheets taking up a lot of sort of stuff. space and PowerJAS is a little bit bigger than the average mechanic. You have prepared spells. You also did use a little bit of, I'll call them deciduous, but there's flashback, there's

landfall, there's threshold. You made a little more use of what I'll call more everyday mechanics to sort of fill things out. Yeah. Flashback and threshold were particularly useful because we wanted graveyard themes. So we're supporting the Theorex themes, which also bleed out into everything Black is doing. landfall, I remember specifically using on cough just because cough is a geomancer,

so it felt very appropriate. And having fewer mechanics in the set, letting us have more of those one-offs or, you know, cameo appearances on the sheets was something I was very happy with. So anyway, any final thoughts on the making of reality fracture? Say a couple things I was very excited about

that I'll just briefly tell you to. We had allied color shifts. allied color hosers. I've always been a fan of sideboard cards and it tickled me that, oh, magic has this history of hating on the enemy colors, but we've sort of softened up on that being a crucial

or load-bearing distinction in magic. So here we just get to flip that on its head and make sideboard cards that we would never make in any ever set. And I'll also say I was very excited about the color-shifted iconics. I remember we looked in a lot of different ways about like, oh, is there you know, creature types we can

shift. And with creature types like elves and goblins, they've mostly been in all the different colors. But it felt like getting to make a green kraken or a black phoenix would be something very novel. Yeah, one thing that's one thing I love looking through the set is

there's a lot, like, I make a teaser for everything, and this like wrote itself, this was the easiest thing to tease in the world. Sometimes I have to like search things out. This set was overrunning with fun things to tease. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it felt great to be able to make a magic set about magic and embrace the challenge of making everything feel cool to players even who aren't as obsessed with magic as we are. So the last thing I just wanted to say before we wrap up is so one of the goals using vision design is you want to push boundaries a little more than you actually expect they'll end up in the sense that you do the wilder version.

And usually a set design does a slightly tamer version of what you hand off. And that's on purpose. We push boundaries a little bit so they have room to pull back. And I felt like I handed off a very adventurousome wild set and you embraced it. You did not back down one iota.

This set is just as wild as we handed it off. Yeah, I mean, exactly three legends per pack and planes walkers at common. Once I accepted that challenge, that was the plan. So I was for thinking, yeah, the set turned out great. So, I mean, you and I've worked together a whole bunch of times, but it's still, it's still fun.

This set really, I think it's true. I mean, I think everybody will like this set, but I think if you're an old time, if you're in franchise Magic Player, there are Easter eggs a plenty for you. And so I do think if, for old time players, especially people probably listening to this podcast, there's stuff in every nook and cranny, there's lots of stuff going on. And it's really, really fun. If you know the stuff we're riffing on, there's a lot of subtle things there

that I think you might appreciate. What is your favorite subtle reference? Do you have a favorite subtle reference in the set? It's not that subtle, but I was just thinking about Burdent Cracken. The main thing it's doing is being a color-shifted iconic of it's a green crackin.

And I'm very proud of it. The design was just me thinking, what if a green crack in its tentacles are trees? I don't know how well that comes through, but I was very proud of it. But then, of course, it's a reference to verdant force, a tempest card that has long not seen any play. So I love that on its face, it's really about just being this cool green crackin, but we still manage to fit a reference in there. So real quick, Verding Cracken, four green, green, green, so seven man of total, three which is green, six, six, plant Cracken.

At beginning of each player's upkeep, you create a three-three green forest tentacle land creature token. So that is not your dad's. So anyway, I want to thank you so much for being with us today, Yanni. It's so much fun to talk through the set. And so thank you for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me. It was great work. We're doing with you on it.

So anyway, guys, this is, I can see my desk. So we all know that this is my end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.