New Reality Fracture Planeswalker Mechanic Synergizes With Underplayed Jace Card

Last updated on September 9, 2026

Dramatic Reversal | Illustration by Eric Deschamps

Yesterday’s Reality Fracture debut revealed a ton of cards from the set, like a new Emrakul, the five elder sphinxes, and the details of a previous teased mechanic: Empower Jace. Designed just for Reality Fracture, the mechanic expresses just how powerful Jace became and how much control he has over Hexhaven and the Echoverse by imbuing tokens with power, and it has a surprising synergy with old Jaces from Zendikar Rising and Ixalan.

What Is Empower Jace?

Empower Jace is a mechanic that puts loyalty counters on a Jace token you control; if you don’t control a Jace token when empowering Jace, you make a token Jace with -1: Surveil 1 and -3: Draw a card, then put the counters on that token. That should sound pretty familiar to anybody playing The Hobbit or other recent sets: It’s effectively amass, but it deals with planeswalker and loyalty counters rather than creatures and +1/+1 counters.

Considering the mechanic without having played it, it seems very flavorful. Previous Jaces have made token copies of themselves to render the mind mage’s illusion magic, and this plays well with the element of Jace splitting off pieces of himself and exerting near-absolute control over the Echoverse. It seems interesting and practice and I look forward to seeing what it does in FRA Limited. But it has potential in Constructed formats because of its synergy with previous Jaces.

Jaces That Make Token Copies of Themselves

Empower Jace needs to put counters on a Jace token but it says nothing about it requiring the token from the mechanic itself. Enter Jace, Mirror Mage and Jace, Cunning Castaway: Two Jaces that make nonlegendary token copies of themselves to empower.

Jace, Mirror Mage has the lowest bar attached to its token, just a little extra mana. The flaw here is that this is basically the worst Jace. The scry rarely matters and the card advantage just sucks. Blue planeswalkers normally draw cards on their uptick, but this one hurts itself and potentially even removes itself without your opponent doing anything. Frankly, I think this is worse than the Jace token empower creates: Surveiling is generally better than scrying and losing a definitive 3 loyalty is easier to plan around than a variable amount unless your deck’s almost exclusive 1- and 2-mana spells.

Jace, Cunning Castaway needs more work to reach its tokens but they’re much more interesting. Most of the empower Jace cards revealed thus far add enough tokens to one of the copies to make more copies, and many of these get out of hand quickly. You can obviously flood the board with Illusion tokens, but it’s worth noting that uptick stacks. For every Jace you activate, you’ll loot when one creature deals damage, so you can easily see two or three cards off one creature connecting.

Other Ways To Make Token Jaces

If you want to get really crazy with empower Jace, you can look at ways to make token copies of nontoken Jaces to add counters to. This adds so many extra steps and mana that it’s really a for-fun Commander strategy, but that’s what most people play!

Blue excels at this with cards like Applied Geometry, Replication Technique, and Flash Photography copying planeswalkers you already control. Note that making the copy a creature doesn’t really matter.

You can also copy Jace spells on the stack with cards like See Double, Lithoform Engine, and Flamehold Grappler. This is often much more mana-intensive but the duplicates provide protection against countermagic.

As for Jaces worth copying, The Theorist, Jace Beleren is very near the top of the list because it’s designed for Commander: All those abilities that scale with the number of opponents you control are well worth getting twice. I’m also super into Jace, the Living Guildpact. Effectively making your opponents discard their hands and lose their graveyards while you draw seven is one of the more convincing win conditions available. Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Jace, the Perfected Mind can be win conditions, but they only knock out one player at a time.