A nine-pocket binder page holds nine cards. The Special Guests panorama in Reality Fracture is ten cards long. I’ve been chewing on that gap for about a week now, which tells you something about how I spend my evenings.
The ten cards are all illustrated by Marina Banker, they sit at Special Guests numbers 159 through 168, and they line up into one continuous scene of the Echoverse. Wizards also says the panorama wraps around on itself, so there’s no first card and no last one. You decide which panel goes in the middle. Which is a lovely idea for an art object and a genuinely annoying one for anybody who catalogs things.
Three panorama cycles, not one
Reality Fracture is doing this in three separate places, which I don’t think has happened in a single set before.
The Special Guests ten are the headline: Eye of Ugin, Austere Command, Flesh Duplicate, Consign to Memory, Sublime Epiphany, Consider, Necrodominance, Mind Twist, Splinter Twin, and Root Maze. Non-foil in Play Boosters, traditional foil in Collector Boosters.
Then the tower basic lands. Fifteen of those, borderless, numbered 382 to 396 in the main set, three per land type. Each type got one artist for all three of its panels: Alayna Danner on Plains, Calder Moore on Island, Daniel Romanovsky on Swamp, Leon Tukker on Mountain, Adam Paquette on Forest. They connect vertically, because the thing they depict is Jace’s tower and the tower goes up.
Here’s where I have to admit I don’t actually know something. Three panels per land type, five land types, fifteen cards. Does that mean five separate three-storey towers, or does the whole set of fifteen stack into one very tall one? The artist split points at five. The flavor points at one. I’ve read the collecting article twice and it doesn’t say, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
And the borderless echoed pairs, which are 30 cards making 15 matched couples, each one a character from the Multiverse beside their colorshifted Echoverse twin, with the two halves forming a single two-card scene. Add it up and you get 55 cards in this set whose art is designed to be looked at next to other cards.
Nothing in the data says “panel four of ten”
Go looking for the structure and it isn’t there. Scryfall knows those fifteen lands are Plains through Forest, knows the collector numbers, knows the artists. There’s no field that says this Island is the bottom of the tower and that one is the top. Pull Reality Fracture 382 from the API right now and it comes back with a black border and a 2015 frame and full art set to false, none of which describes a borderless tower land. The metadata catches up eventually. It just hasn’t yet, and even once it does, “borderless” is as specific as it gets.
So every tool downstream inherits the same blind spot. A want list will happily tell you that you’re missing one card. It has no way to tell you that the card you’re missing is the middle of a picture, which is the one piece of information that would actually change what you do next. Missing a random Special Guest is a completion percentage. Missing panel six of ten means the other nine are a wall decoration with a hole in it.
I bought a Marvel Scene Box back in July, six foil borderless cards that lock together into one image, and I sleeved them and put them in a cheap float frame and hung the thing above my desk. Sometime around late August I noticed I’d put the third and fourth panels in the wrong order. Two months. Nobody mentioned it. Either nobody looks at my office wall or my friends are kinder than they let on. Anyway, that’s the failure mode with these, and it doesn’t show up in a spreadsheet either, because the spreadsheet said 6/6.
What I do now, and it’s not clever, is put the cycle in the name. When I scan these in October they’re going into Eldwyn tagged as one group, and I’ll write the collector number range in the tag itself so future me doesn’t have to reconstruct it. spg-panorama 159-168. Ugly, works. I’ve written before about how to actually complete a set and track what’s missing, and the short version there applies here too: decide what counts as done before you start buying, not after.
The ten panels are not ten similar cards
This is the part I think people will get wrong, because “ten-card panorama” sounds like a cycle and cycles usually price flat.
The Special Guests printings aren’t priced yet. Every one of the ten comes back null on Scryfall as I write this, which is normal two weeks out from a prerelease. But you can read the underlying cards. Consider’s newest printing is a 30-cent common. Eye of Ugin in Modern Masters 2015 is $59.05. Splinter Twin is $8.75 there and Necrodominance sits at $3.32 in Modern Horizons 3. Special Guests printings have historically carried a premium over the base card anyway, so treat those as floors rather than estimates.
Which means the panorama has an expensive corner. If you want the whole picture you are buying one chase card and nine other cards, and if Eye of Ugin lands where I think it’s going to land, the last panel is going to cost more than the first nine combined.
The tower lands are the opposite shape. Reality Fracture Plains is sitting at $1.99 in preorder, and they’re basic lands, which means they’ll be printed into the ground and they’ll be cheap forever. Fifteen cards at two bucks is a $30 art project, before the foils. That’s the most affordable assemble-a-picture cycle Wizards has put in a set in a while, and honestly it’s the one I’d chase. Some of the basic lands genuinely worth money got there by being from weird print runs, but these won’t be, and I’m fine with that.
Although, hold on. I’ve spent this whole article arguing you should track these as cycles, and I want to push back on myself for a second, because there’s a decent case that assembling a panorama is a mug’s game. You’re paying a premium for nine cards you don’t want so that one picture looks right in a binder nobody opens. Buy the three panels with the best art, put them in the frame, done. That’s a completely defensible way to collect and it costs a tenth as much.
I don’t think I believe it, though. Not for this set. The wrap-around thing is doing something to me. A panorama with no fixed center is the one version of this where “just buy three” actively loses the joke.
The bit that’ll bite in October
So yeah, prerelease is September 25th and the set’s out on the 2nd. Play Boosters, which is where the non-foil Special Guests live, are the product that might be short in North America thanks to a ship stuck at the Panama Canal. Collector Boosters are fine. The tower lands come out of Play Boosters too, at about a one-in-five rate for the non-foil version.
One practical thing, and then I’ll stop. Write the collector number ranges down now, before release, while the previews are still fresh and everyone’s talking about which panel is which. Special Guests 159 to 168. Main set 382 to 396. In three months that information will be genuinely annoying to reassemble, because nobody indexes cards by where they sit in a picture, and the cards themselves won’t tell you. There’s no little “4 of 10” in the corner. I checked.
If you want the full product-side breakdown of what’s in which box, I went through what the Collector Booster actually locks away a couple of weeks back, and the ten Secret Lair Bundle promos are a separate headache from these fifty-five.