Francis Tneh illustrated the Booster Fun version of the blue sorcery Cruel Calculations with a new frame called Sculptor’s Stronghold, which will appear on a total of 25 cards in the set. Executive producer Mike Turian tells Polygon the treatment is meant to demonstrate how Jace is watching over the Echoverse. The card is closely tied to the Theorix school at Hexhaven, the Echoverse’s twisted version of Strixhaven, which the Theorist uses as his base.
“This art for Cruel Calculations shows some of the inherent risks that come with the kind of forbidden reality-bending math and physics being taught in Theorix,” Reality Fracture narrative lead Meris Mullaley tells Polygon via email. “The best Theorix students can learn to bend reality, but for every elite student, there are many peers who failed their tests.”
The card is meant to synergize with Omit Variables, a prepared spell found on Theorix cards like the uncommon
Image: Wizards of the Coast
Beyond working well with Reality Fracture’s self-mill archetype, Cruel Calculations is likely to see play in constructed decks that focus on milling opponents.
“Balancing the card, we found 2U to be an aggressive but reasonable cost, as it requires another card to enable, and a two-card combo that doesn't impact the board is usually easy for the metagame to counter,” Skolnik said. “In testing current Standard, Secrets of Strixhaven was the card that most impressed me in enabling Cruel Calculations, but being creature based had us feeling confident the strategy had vulnerabilities.”
Empowering Jace
One of Reality Fracture’s core mechanics is Empower Jace, a riff on the amass mechanic introduced in War of the Spark. It adds loyalty counters to an existing Jace token or creates a blue Jace planeswalker token with the ability to spend one loyalty to surveil 1 and three to draw a card.“We created Empower Jace in exploratory design and put it into the very first vision design file,” head designer Mark Rosewater tells Polygon. “It got rave reviews at every playtest, and it never left the set. Because it was such an important part of the set (it helped have Jace’s presence felt throughout limited play) we chose to put Empower Jace in all five colors, but the most in blue, Jace’s color. Obviously, as it leans into blue’s strengths, blue has access to Empower Jace at a better rate.”
Polygon can also exclusively reveal the red instant Violent Echoes, which deals six damage to a creature or planeswalker and adds loyalty tokens to Jace based on the excess damage.
Image: Wizards of the CoastRosewater says Reality Fracture will include a total of eight Planeswalkers: gives an ultimate ability that adds a +1/+1 counter to a creature for each land you control, and Skolnik said other blue/green cards will allow Empower Jace to generate creature tokens.
Image: Wizards of the Coast