Last updated on September 10, 2026
Ichormoon Gauntlet | Illustration by Tiffany Turrill
The Reality Fracture debut stream introduced the mechanics of the set, including empower Jace, an amass-like mechanic for planeswalkers that's caused price spikes for the artifact Ichormoon Guantlet, a niche planeswalker support card from Phyrexia: All Will Be One.
Source: TCGPlayer
Ichormoon Gauntlet has a history of price volatility. This was one of the most hyped cards from ONE, commanding a preorder price around $35, but the price dipped sharply once players realized just how many loyalty counters 12 is. Whether or not this sticks remains to be seen.
How Does Empower Jace Work With Ichormoon Guantlet?
For those unfamiliar, empower Jace appears on multiple cards throughout Reality Fracture as a headliner mechanic. Empower Jace always has a number attached: When the ability or spell resolves, you put that many loyalty counters on a Jace token you control; if you don't control one, you first create a Jace token with 0 loyalty, -1: Surveil 1, and -3: Draw a card, then put those counters on it. It's amass for planeswalkers.
Ichormoon Gauntlet players wants to use empower Jace to accelerate towards the extra turn ability much faster. Ordinarily, reaching 12 on a planeswalker requires multiple planeswalkers investing in the 0 ability to proliferate. But cards like Protege's Awakening and Jace's Machinations add half or even more than half of the counters needed for the ability. Some of the rares with empower Jace X, such as Overwrite the Multiverse and Repurposed Enforcer, could potentially add 12 loyalty counters, in a perfect world.
Will Empower Jace Be Good With Ichormoon Gauntlet?
Jace, the Mind Sculptor | Illustration by Jason Chan
While the line of thought is solid, don't play ante on this being the next big thing.
Empower Jace gets to make big planeswalkers for relatively little mana because it's balanced around the token being fairly weak. It's perfectly safe to give a planeswalker 8 loyalty for 3 mana when all it can do is draw cards or surveil, both abilities removing loyalty. Breaking it with additional abilities is a clever way to get the most of the mechanic.
The problem with Ichormoon Gauntlet is its mana cost and the eventual payoff. Twelve loyalty is a lot and 4 mana is a lot for an artifact that's mostly just sitting in play so your other cards hopefully do something. There's also the sketchy power of these card separately; if your Ichormoon Guantlet dies, are those empower Jace cards actually worth running? This combo also requires time and resources for an ability that's only okay. Taking extra turns is fantastic in Magic, but by the time you've played Ichormoon Gauntlet and your empower Jace cards, you've spent considerably more cards and mana than if you just played a Time Warp or Part the Waterveil. A single extra turn isn't worth the effort, unless you invest even more into somehow recurring your empower cards to enable an infinite loop. I'm sure you can achieve that with the right five or six cards.
Like most things in Magic, this has merit in low-bracket Commander games—I can see a player preferring the Rube Goldberg machine to the straight extra turn spell—but I imagine this will be another temporary spike for Ichormoon Gauntlet rather than a rise to staple status. If you really want to break empower Jace, I recommend making token copies of actually good Jace planeswalkers, which I talked about yesterday:
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