Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1387: Reality Fracture Limited with Ben Weitz

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

In this episode, I sit down with Ben Weitz, lead play designer for Reality Fracture Limited, to talk about how we approached the set for Limited.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for other drives at work at home edition. Normally I do interviews when I'm at home, and today is no difference. So I've Ben White's with me. We're going to talk all about building the limited reality fracture environment. Hey, Ben. Hey, Mark, how's it going?

Okay, so let's start from the very beginning. So just so people understand, when do you start getting involved in this? Like your portion of this. Right. So I joined the team sometime in set design. So after you or the vision designers have already handed off to the set lead, who in this case was Yanni Skolnick. And I'm on the team for basically the entire duration of set design. And then when it moves into play design and we start doing the final limited balance and like the really like polishing of the archetype strategies, I am leading that.

process and figuring out how we, you know, want to balance stuff. So how long from when you start to when you stop, but what's the rough amount of time that you spend on this? Oh, man. I actually don't know. I mean, set design is like six months or something, right? Some design is closer to eight to ten months. Okay, eight to ten months.

And then play design. It's four months, but it overlaps. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, yeah, quite a while. I remember working on the set for over a year, so. Okay. So let's start from the beginning. This is not a simple, limited environment, correct?

No, not at all. This is actually one of the most complicated environments that I've ever worked on. You know, the key mechanic and power Jace is a very complicated mechanic. It's extremely fun, but it causes a lot of decision points and a lot of tracking. in the game. And there's also just a ton of individually bespoke cool cards in the echoed legends that create a lot of complicated board states. Okay, so let's start with Echo and PowerJase, because I think that is foundationally, one of the tricks in design is you tend to start with the most complicated thing that's the most

important because you want to be able to build around it so it can have the space that it needs. So let's start talking about it first, Empower J's. How do you make Empower Jays, how do you build a limited environment around Empower Jays? So some sets have one mechanic that sort of underlies everything. That's like reality fracture. Other sets have, you know, like faction sets, for example, will have their own mechanics in isolated color pairs.

When you have one mechanic underlying everything, I think it's kind of important to try to make sure that the different colors are interacting with that mechanic in different ways. So in reality fracture, you've got blue and green are like the main Empower Jace color pairs or colors. And those are the colors that like put the biggest numbers of Empower Jace. So those are the colors that we wanted to make sure, hey, you know, this is going to be your number. main strategy, we need to give you cool things to do if you're empowering Jace a lot. Sometimes that just means, hey, you get to draw a lot of cards, and that's fun to do in magic, and that's awesome. Other times, it's like, hey, what if instead of drawing cards, you could use your Jace

for something else? So maybe you could create a 4-4-Bs token, or maybe you could, you know, open the rare Jace reality sculptor who has an ultimate ability where if you have 25 or more loyalty counters on your Jace's, you basically win the game. You know, those colors wanted to interact with Empower Jays in that way. But other colors that have less Empower Jace, we still needed to make sure could use that mechanic in cool ways. So it didn't feel like they were losing out on the fun, you know? So like red and black care a lot more about using your Jace as like a piece of cardboard, basically like a token that you might sacrifice or utilize in some other way. Other colors want to use the Jace to like fill their graveyard and stuff like that.

So it's kind of, it was important to us to make sure that even though there's one mechanic that all of the colors are engaging with, they're doing it in a different way. And so when you play the games, you get a different experience. Okay, so let's start at common, because common a lot of ways shapes the limited environment. What were the rules you had with Empower Jace are common? What did you guys want to do with Empower Jace there? Well, we tried to specifically avoid empowering Jace in multiples of three because three is when you get to draw a card with your Jace token.

So if you empower Jays in a multiple of three, that's sort of, it just translates very directly to, oh, I draw this many cards. That's what the strong thing is to do. We did, I think, make one card, one blue common in Power Jace 3. I believe it's a four-manna sorcery that has draw card in Power Jace 6. And that was sort of our execution on, oh, this is the common blue draw spell. But by and large, we just tried to avoid multiples of three. The blue and the green cards, like I said, are the colors that empower Jace the largest

amount. So there's a blue common mind secret oculus, I believe it's called, which is a two and a blue for a two one. And when it enters the battlefield, you empower Jace 4. That's like sort of the marquee blue empower Jace common. And we also felt that empowering Jace 2 was sort of like a really fun number to empower because you could combine part of the fun of Empower Jace is you combine it with other Empower Jace cards in order to start drawing an extra card right it's not you don't get the you don't get the full reward right away but if you get to combine your cards in in clever ways then you get a bigger bigger a bigger output than just surveilling a bunch of times or whatever so you'll see a lot of commons especially in like white and green um power jace 2 instead of

the larger numbers. Yeah, the interesting thing, so one of the things we often talk about is the importance of we call it, we call them knobs, I guess, in R&D, but we want to make sure that the play designers have a lot of tools to balance, and that one of the things about Jace,

and Power Jace, that's really cool is, you have a lot of things to play around with, there's a lot of things to use to balance. Yeah, for sure. I mean, play design honestly loves to add Scriy one or surveil one to a bunch of cards to just make them ever so slightly stronger or to help players hit their land drops, you know, stuff like that, just general quality of life

improvements. Empower Jace is like a whole mechanic that allows us to do that. And the difference between Empower Jace 1 and Empower Jace 2 is a pretty thin difference, which is very useful for us when we're trying to like dial in on the perfect power level. Were there certain colors that you had more trouble with Empower Jace? Yeah. I think one of the impacts of Empower Jace is that it gives all colors access to a lot of card advantage and a lot of selection. So especially decks that wanted to be a little more aggressive,

or actually decks that wanted to be a little more mid-ranging, often struggled with competing with some of the control decks in the late game because the control decks could just use Empower Jace to draw a ton of cards and the mid-range decks often couldn't quite keep up with that. So that was one of the challenges of Empower Jace. Also, just color pie-wise, red can't really empower Jace very much because red is one of the worst scrying colors. So the red cards that empower Jace,

we had to be very careful about the numbers that we were giving it. And also because of that, we sort of had to have red not be so Empower Jace-centric. Like, it had to have other things that wanted to do. So another thing that's interesting is one of the challenges with Plainswalkers in general is that kind of slow the game, right? Because instead of attacking your opponent,

you're attacking the Plainswalker. How did that come into play when building Limited? Yeah, that was something that we paid really close attention to. So when we do playtests, we always have like a question survey that people fill out after the playtest. When you're leading Limited, you're the one who writes that survey. And so you pick questions that you're most interested in asking. One of my questions, basically the entire life cycle of the set was how do you feel about how much life people are gaining?

Because like you said, not only do Plainswalkers existing add life to the game, but also life gain was like a major theme in reality fracture. So we're sort of double-downing on that, doubling down on that. And that was something I really wanted to track and to make sure that, even though we were injecting a bunch of life into the game, the games were still going to end at an appropriate time. So, you know, a lot of game design is more art than science. It's hard to say exact, like, you know, we don't compute a density of life gain and then pick the, like, exact target that's correct.

We kind of just do it by feel. But it definitely was something that we were thinking about and cautious about. Because a lot of the times you'll just attack Jason instead of attacking a player. So something else you talked about with that was something we allowed you. at higher rarities to add abilities to your Jace Plainswalker so that he was doing other things other than just surveilling or drawing cards. How did that play? How did you balance that stuff?

That stuff was really interesting. It was actually one of the hardest things to balance in the set. I think the two hardest things to balance were the way of enchantments, which is what you're referring to, these enchantments that grafted new abilities onto your Jace. There's a cycle of 10 of them. And then, like, deciding how many legends should be tied into the set themes versus how many legends should just be doing their own sideways build-around thing. Those are, like, the two hardest, I would say those are the two hardest things in the set to work on.

The way enchantments, mostly we just kept making them stronger and strong. as the as we playtested more and more because everyone loved them like they were just really fun but as enchantments that enter and don't really impact the board right away they're they tend not to be that strong so pretty much the whole time I was always just like can I add another number to this empower Jace value is everyone okay with that and play design would always kind of be like yeah, that's probably fine. So I think way of the wild speaker, which is the five-manna green enchantment

that allows your Jases to minus four to create a 4-4, and it enters the battlefield to Empower J-7. That card was Empire J-6 for a long time until near the end. We were like, look, this card could be a little bit stronger, so why don't we just go up to 7? Then you can make a 4-4 and draw a card. So the one that really fascinated me

So way of the pyromancer Is one in a red When it enters you empower Jase 2 And it's I think the only plus right It's plus one get red mana I had this in my in the pre-release So talk a little bit about adding Because no other cards add loyalty

Yeah I was pretty I think me and Yanni were both pretty Set on having one of the ways Put a plus ability on your play Because that's just like a very clean dream. Like it's just very easy to look at that card and think to yourself, oh, like now my token like actually functions like a like a normal plainswalker. I can go up and if I go up enough times that I can draw another card.

So we were always interested in in having a plus. There were actually, I think there was a rare one that had a different plus at some point as well, but we ended up. up not liking that card very much. So I guess there's a creature, Sanctum Lurker, that grafts a plus two ability to your Jases. And it also has the extremely wild line of text where your Plainswalkers don't die if they have zero loyalty. Yeah, let me read this card real quick. Sanctum Lurker, two in a black, three, two, it's a horror creature. When this creature enters in Power Jace 1, planes Walkers you control aren't put into their owner's graveyard for having zero loyalty.

Plainswalkers you control have plus two. This plane walker deals one damage to each opponent and you gain one life. Yeah, so I think sanctum lurker and way of the power mansion are the ones that remain of the things that graft pluses to your planeswalkers. But we just thought that dream was really aspirational and clean and people love it. And then for Way of the Power Menter specifically, there's also this very nice curve of way of the Power Mancer into Chandra Torch of Defiance into a Johnny unrelenting, which is just like a Plainswalker curve out. And it's just really cool. And we were

hoping for people to enjoy playing with that. So before we move off from PowerJ's, a question I get, I'm going to run by you because I keep getting this 5-Gen. Did you guys really question it a common? Because it definitely is a mechanic. If you had told me, you know, when I first started at Wizards 30 years ago and showed me this card, I would and said this is a comment, I would be very surprised. Yeah, I would say, honestly, the first time I heard of Empower Jason,

I was kind of like, that sounds incredibly complicated and horrible. But then I played with it. And as soon as I played with it, I was like, okay, this is super fun. It's worth the complexity. The nice thing is that it provides a very easy default action. Like minus three draw card is just such a strong thing to do in limited, but it's just a very easy decision to make that I think that really like sort of saves the whole mechanic, basically. And I think that's what makes it okay to put at common because even though, you know, there's a lot of tracking and fiddliness, the decision making generally is pretty easy. You kind of just, if your jace gets to three or higher, you minus three in.

And so I think we were definitely on the lookout for concerns about the complexity at common, but at the end of the day, the mechanic just plays so fun that it's worth it. I also want to point out this for the audience, because we did put it in a common in vision design. The thing we did to justify that is there's not a lot of other complexity in the set. I mean, this is the main mechanic, and we, I mean, it's a more complex set than average set. I won't deny that. But we didn't.

There's not a lot of other mechanics. You know, I mean, we'll get to in a second, some of the other things we did. But it is, we put a lot of weight on making that mechanic you had to care about and know about. And that the second Empower Jace is a lot easier than the first Empower Jace. Because once you understand what you're doing, each further one is a lot easier to process. It's not, they do blend together to make you make a single decision, not infinite decisions. Yeah, definitely. Okay, so let's move on to the schools.

Another big part was Hexhaven and the five ally schools, which had a lot to define at least the archetypes of the ally colors. Yeah. So the allied schools were sort of defined as mirrors to the Strickshaven schools. So a lot of them share a good amount of mechanical overlap, their Strickshaven school but they're often like slightly different. So like fate hold for example is well actually I guess I was thinking theorics and lore holder kind of similar mechanically but they're not flavorfully.

Yeah we sort of decided that in order to cut down on the complex because okay because it's set on Strickshaven we want or alternate Strickshaven We wanted something that related it back to regular Strickson. And so doing more creatures with Prepared felt like the right thing to do. We thought Prepared was a really cool mechanic. People like Prepared. And if we do it again, but with like the more evil or the more echoed versions of people, then that would make sense as like an anchoring in Strickshaven.

However, like you said, EmpowerJ is a really complicated mechanic. and we wanted to minimize that complexity. So I think Yanni, very early on, wanted to, or like, latched on to, we're just going to have five spells. Well, that was a vision. We hadn't did that off. Oh, you did that in vision?

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that was before I joined the team, so I wasn't exactly sure who had figured that out. I mean, Yanni was on the vision design team, so I mean, Yanni was part of this decision. But we decided very early on that a common and uncommon, we would just have one spell per, per school.

Yeah, and I think that also does, like, a good job of conveying the, like, conformity that, uh, of Hexhaven that I think wants to bleed through. Uh, just, you know, everyone is the same because they all have the same spell. Um, but those spells- We also made one token. That was the other thing we did for, like, they're all the same. They make cadets. That's what they make. Yep. Um, but the nice thing about having that one spell in the different, uh, hybrid cards.

I think every spell ended up on one hybrid common, one hybrid uncommon, and one monocolor common. I believe except the Constrari spell, which is a monocolor uncommon instead of a monocolor common. But anyway. And the spell is always, the spell itself is hybrid. Yep, yep. That repetition, or that like the same thing showing up a bunch of times in the file, means that we can build those archetypes around that effect. And you're going to just be able to reliably have that effect.

And because they're prepared spells, they also get to hook into a bunch of other parts of the set. So the fact that they were extremely hooky, let us make these really cool legend designs. Like, just for example, the Black Danatha. Appalachian, I can't remember. I'm sorry, but she's an uncommon. she's two and her.

Okay, I got it. Danatha Spear of Agony, two in the black, two, legendary creature, human knight, first strike, whenever you cast a spell

that targets an opponent or a creature and opponent controls, put a plus one plus McConnell on Danatha. Right. So this card is like a totally her own thing. She cares about when you cast spells the target opponent

or a creature and opponent controls, but the Stinger Quill spell targets your opponent. And that, that just lets us make this sort of card that just ties into this, you know, tiny piece of the Stinger Quill spell that wasn't, you know, that's not the main purpose of the Stinger Quill spell.

But it just, these things have all these little pieces of them that let us build up the synergy of the set. And I thought it was actually really cool. Okay, so let's quickly walk through the five schools. So I'll go in Woburgar here. So Fade Hold is the White Blue Scout. It's the history school, but they're looking at the future. Yeah.

So that prepared spell is peer review, which is two in a hybrid for create a 2-2 token, and you surveil one. And that archetype cares about scrying and surveilling. Well, surveilling in the set, because empower Jason peer review both do the surveilling thing. And that deck is supposed to be like a flyers or like a go-wide deck where you,

like gum up the ground and you can kill your opponent with flying creatures or you can like pump your team in various ways. And yeah, mostly like a tempo deck. Okay, blue-black is Therix. The math school. Now in black. That's my favorite school personally. I'm a big Therix fan. I thought I was Quondrix for, you know, many years. But then I finally realized once we made Hexhaven, I was like, oh, Actually, I've been Theorix all along. But yeah, they have a milling spell, which is called omit variables. It's for a blue-black hybrid.

You just mill three cards. And this is a really weird deck. It's like a graveyard value deck where you want to play enough. You want to use your graveyard as a resource so that this omit variable spell can like sometimes give you access to more effects. Like there's a bunch of cards that exile out of your graveyard in order to perform spell-like effects. There's also like bonuses for like milling out your library in this set, which is really cool. The theric spell also, like I said, it's hooky because it like triggers prowess. So there's like some prowess stuff that you can do with it.

But yeah, generally the blue-black deck is one of the harder ones to draft, I think. It's kind of sometimes you can play it controlling, but often you have to figure out how to win, which can be somewhat difficult. One thing I remember always thinking about in Theorix was making sure that the cards, omit variables is like a spell that it's not super obvious what you're supposed to do with it. Like, why do I want to mill myself for three? It's not always clear why you might want to do that. So we tried really hard to make sure that each of the cards that has omit variables

has some other ability that tells you why you might want to have a large graveyard. Okay, next up is Red Black, our language school, Stinger Quill. Yeah, the Stinger Quill deck was like always an aggressive deck that their spell is vicious verse. It's a black red hybrid to deal one damage to target opponent. That deck cares about non-combat damage and it's like it's kind of a mirror to Silver Quill and that Silver Quill cared about like casting spells that targeted your opponent's creatures. and this school cares about casting spells that hurt your opponent, so they're kind of related in that way.

But this is one of my favorite schools to draft in the set because we wanted the set to be very creative and expressive with all the different uncommon legends. So we tried to make sure that even the aggressive decks were not too fast, and when your deck theme is burn spells, that can be kind of challenging. But we made some designs like hallway heckler, which is two in a red for a two, three, and it has tap, discard a card, draw card, and it also enters prepared with vicious verse, the pinging spell.

And that card, a bunch of its power, is just in the fact that you can use it to discard a card and then draw card. so it's like a card selection tool, which in red is a little more important to have around because like we said earlier, red is not as good at empowering Jace as all the other colors. So this is a card that could still provide it some of that card selection.

But in your Stinger Quill deck, this will sort of let you have some inevitability late game, but it's not going to kill your opponents super quickly. Okay, next we get to the red-green school, Constrari the art school. Yeah, Constrari was red-green ramp for as long as I can remember. We really wanted there to be a somewhat simple school that was very strong. So there's a lot of Constrari cards that are just kind of, I am a big creature,

and I am very good at winning the game of magic when you cast me. and so yeah we just wanted to make sure that there was stuff in the set for you know a lot of players like to be to draw a bunch of cards they like to be very you know fiddily they can empower their jace

they can take it down they can empower it again they can draw another card they can kill your creature they can draw another card but some other players just want to play really expensive creatures and smash with them and so we were always

we wanted the Constrari school to be relatively simple to play. You just, you ramp and you play expensive spells. And I think it turned out really well, actually. Yeah, just a big fan of sometimes

just play a seven-mana creature and kill your opponent with it. Okay, next up is green white, which is Vigrbloom the science school. Yeah, Vigorbloom is a life game deck

that also has some like plus plus one counter synergies. The, we did a common, the unflinching hortemancer, I believe its name is, which is one in a white for a two one with Ward 1, and whenever you gain life, put a plus one on it. That is a common that has whenever you gain life put a plus one counter on me, which is not really something I think we've ever done before. Usually those cards are uncommon, but we really wanted to try.

try to drive home the life game theme here. And we felt like this was a good place to try it out, especially because games can go along and having a high synergy is kind of one of the goals of the set. So, you know, we have some real, you can get some really powerful starts in Viguerblum where you go unflinching hortemancer and then find some creatures that gain life and that card, or put like Medics Kite's Sail on it. Do you want to say what MediXs? kite sail does, Mark. Oh, sure. We have a second. Kite Sale. Medics Kite Sale costs two. It's an artifact equipment.

Equipped creature gets plus one plus O and is flying. And whenever this creature attacks, you gain one life, equipped two. Yeah. So if you put Medics Kite Sail on the Hortemancer, it's now all of a sudden has flying and it's getting a plus one counter every turn. So those strategies were cool. We kind of struggled with Greenwhite for a while because it doesn't have a lot of natural card advantage, and your synergies could get broken up by removal spells a lot. But I think we eventually solved that problem by, we put Ward on the hortemancer to help with that, and also just giving white-green access to some more reliable

sources of life gain, like the kite sale, sort of helped it out. Okay, let's quickly go through. There are five enemy loosely thematically tied to the members of the Lorwyn Five they're in the story. So white black, loosely tied to

Liliana is? Yeah, I mean, white black is kind of like a grindy mid-range archetype where there are some sacrifice synergies, but not a ton. But mostly you're just expected to, you know, play evasive creatures, play strong

removal spells, play resilient creatures so that even if your opponent has their own removal spells, it's kind of hard to get through, turn through your creatures. Yeah, white black is much more of a sort of, I don't want to call it good stuff, but it's definitely lighter on the synergy. So blue red, loosely tied to Chandra, is? Blue Red is a spells deck. It's like a prowess, non-creature, creature deck. the gold card is Sahili, which is two in a blue and a red for a two-four,

with whenever you cast a non-creature spell, create a one-on-thopter, and all thopters have haste. So this is a card that's very powerful if you're casting a lot of non-creature spells. And luckily, with the prepared spells, it's not that hard to be casting a lot of non-creature spells. Okay, black, green, loosely tied to Garrick is? Yeah, this is another, like, control mid-range deck with, like, a lot of, this one has a lot of self-mill involved, so you can sort of recur your creatures, and it's got a lot of strong removal spells because it touches on black, just like white-black.

And there's also like a little like Trample plus Death Touch sub-Theme that's going on in this color pair where there's a lot of creatures with Trample and a lot of ways to grant Trample, and also a lot of ways to grant Death Touch. and when you combine those two keywords together, it is very powerful. If you explain to the audience and they don't know what happens when you combine Death Touch with... When you combine Death Touch and Trample and you attack, Death Touch means you only have to assign one damage to every creature that blocks. And Trample means you can assign all the rest of your damage to the opponent.

So basically, you just take your power and you minus the number of creatures that are blocking it, and that's how much damage you deal to your opponent. regardless of the toughness of those creatures, which means that it's, if you know what Thorne Elemental does from back in the day, it's really close to turning all of your creatures into Thorne Elemental. And it kills all the creatures that it hits too. True.

True, because it does death touch. Okay, so next up is Red White. They have it loosely tied to a Johnny. Yeah, Red White is like an agro plus one plus one counters deck. I think pretty straightforward. You're just trying to kill your opponents by, you know, removing their blockers, attacking with big creatures, you want to put plus almost one counters on your stuff.

It's pretty straightforward. And that loops us back to Green Blue, loosely tied to Jace, which we talked about at the very beginning. Yes, Green Blue is a fully empowered Jace deck. This is where you go to draw all the cards. This is where you go to make best use of the way of enchantments. This is one of the more favorite archetypes of play design, I believe. Okay, so the last thing we talk about before you wrap up for today,

is let's talk a little about the parochete and what that meant for building limited, especially the In Commons. Yeah, I mean, I could probably, you know, I can talk for three hours. Three hours is low. I could talk for, you know, months about this probably. But, uh... Well, you need that the short version of what impact did it have, like, in an overview sense. What impact did it have having all these legendary creatures?

Very big impact. First off, we, I mean, almost, I think, Every uncommon creature in the set is legendary. No, not every single one, but a lot of the monocolor creatures in the set that are uncommon or legendary. We had to decide, because they're legendary, that's a bunch of constraints on them, because they all represent a character in magic. So we have to give them a design that makes sense for that character. And they also have, you know, an echoed version, which is like the mirrored version of that character.

So we also have to make a design. The design that we make, there has to be some axis along which it makes sense to mirror it. So that the echoed version, you know, does something related but difference or opposite in some way. So there were a ton of constraints on these cards. We needed to figure out, okay, how much are these cards? For each of these cards, how much of them is going to tie into the main themes of the set? like should these cards deal non-combat damage should they scry or surveil should they gain life

what should they care about how many of them should be like sideways buildarounds that are just like hey this is what the character does you remember this character from you know way back when or it's a popular commander or something and you know sort of what they're well known for

they should do something similar to that and so manage I remember like managing a spreadsheet and just basically like going through all the themes in the set and like marking off like okay like could we change this card to work better with this like this theme is under supported so we kind of have to like figure out somewhere where we can add some text related to this so it was all like a lot of work and a lot of iteration I would say um overall I'm like pretty I'm really happy with where we ended up there's a lot of them are still tied into the

main set themes in like pretty obvious ways. Like let's let's take Tiny Bones, for example. Okay, hold on, Tiny Bones. Okay, so Tiny Bones is pocket nuisance, two black, two one, legendary creature, skeleton, rogue. When Tiny Bone enters, each opponent discards a card. Whenever a player discards one or more cards, Tiny Bones deals one damage to each opponent. And then Tiny Bones mirror, his Echoverse version, is Titan Bones. Towering Heart, three in the green, four, three.

also a skeleton druid, or skeleton druid, reach whenever you gain life, put two plus one plus encounters on Titan Bones. Whenever you discard this card, you gain three life. Yeah, so Tiny Bones, you know, ties into the non-combat damage theme because every time a player discards a card, Tiny Bones will deal one damage to that player.

But it only does that if you figure out ways to have someone discard a card. Could be your opponent, could be you, but someone has to discard a card in order for that to work. That sends you on a totally different quest in Limited. You're like, okay, I have to find cards that discard cards, which cards are those? Maybe the hallway heckler that we talked about earlier that has, you know, tap, discard a card, draw a card.

Maybe it's, you know, maybe it's a land cycler because cycling ends up discarding a card. There's a bunch of legends that do this thing where they like half tie into a theme, but they send you on your own, on their own like bespoke quest. And so it feels like special. It feels like this card is making me look at different things. And we tried really hard to capture that magic. Tiny Bones is one of my favorite ones in the set. So like, you know, not all of them are as elegant or as awesome as that one. But that was a really difficult ask because of how constrained these cards in these cards were.

But I do think that we did a really good job. And a bunch of them are just, the set is so, in my opinion, And the set is so replayable. Like, you can draft a black-red deck, and it can look like three different black-red decks, depending on which of the legends you drafted to put in your deck. Yeah, one other what we didn't talk about, we won't go too deep here, is there was one other constraint,

which is we didn't want the pairs playing super well together because we didn't want you feel bad when you picked one and had a pass the other. Yep, exactly. So a lot of them care about, a lot of the mirrors care about opposite things or are trying not to be specifically good with each other. But anyway, I do want to point this up before we wrap up for today.

I think my favorite limited experience I've had in the entire year was the employee pre-release playing this set. It's so much fun. I mean, for people that have not yet played the limited of this set, it is so much fun. And every time you play, like you said, it's very different. The different characters really send you down different paths. ass and Empower Jace.

I mean, we came up, Jeremy made Empower Jace in exploratory design. It was in the very first playtest we had, and we loved it, and I love it till this day. It's a super fun mechanic, so... It's excellent. As a play designer, I'm shocked that the numbers never changed. I'm told that Jeremy, like, right away

was like minus one, Surveillance 1, minus 3 draw card, and it just stayed that way the entire time. I mean, he was minus 1, Scrii one, I think, originally, but other than Scrid to surveil, which is not much of a change. Yeah, he nailed it exactly. I printed that in my article, which is literally the very first thing he pitched was that, which is, and for people outside the building, the fact that the designer would actually nail the numbers, the first time is unheard of.

I mean, it's beyond unheard of, so it's very impressive. Yeah. So anyway, I want to thank you for being with us today, Ben. Any final thoughts from you on reality fracture? I love reality fracture. I'm really proud of it. I think a bunch of different people at the company just did an incredibly awesome job. Thank you so much for, you know, building the foundation that the set design team worked off of.

And my favorite thing I did recently was play the White Galta, which basically basically makes things deal damage equal to their toughness instead of their power. And I got seven wins on Arena with a white Galta and blue Yargle deck. Blue Yargle, of course, is just a five-manna-three-nine. And that's it. That's it. It's just a five-mana-three-nine. Very cool. Very cool.

Well, thank you so much for joining us today. It was fun talking all about the limited environment. But, as I can see my desk, we all know that means this is the 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.