I opened a Secrets of Strixhaven pack back in April, pulled a Ral Zarek, and spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time squinting at the watermark behind his text box. It wasn’t a guild symbol. It wasn’t one of the five colleges. It was some kind of cracked-pane thing I’d never seen on a card before. I decided it was a Hexhaven house I hadn’t bothered to learn yet, sleeved the card, and forgot about it for three months.
It was the Echoverse. Scryfall has been quietly tagging that card watermark: fracture since release.
That’s the detail I keep coming back to after the MagicCon Amsterdam panel on Friday, where Wizards finally showed the Reality Fracture planeswalkers properly: new versions of Garruk, Chandra, Liliana, Ajani, and Jace, all paired with a counterpart in a different color. I wrote about the pack-pair mechanic back in May when we had exactly four cards to look at and a lot of hand-waving. Now there are twenty catalogued, and the data says something a bit different from the headlines.
The five Reality Fracture planeswalkers, except two of them aren’t
Here’s what’s actually on Scryfall right now:
- Ajani Resolute, {1}{W}, paired with Ajani Unrelenting at {4}{R}{R}
- Chandra, Chill of Compliance, {1}{U}{U}, paired with Chandra, Torch of Defiance at {2}{R}{R}
- Garruk, Curse Breaker, {3}{G}{G}, paired with Garruk, Veiled Butcher at {3}{B}{B}
- Liliana the Faultless, {W}, paired with Liliana the Repentant at {1}{B}
- The Theorist, Jace Beleren, {2}{U}{U}
Both Lilianas are Legendary Creatures. Faultless is a Human Cleric, Repentant is a Human Warlock with an exhaust ability that reanimates a creature or planeswalker for {5}{B}. Neither one is a planeswalker at all. So the “five planeswalkers” framing every site ran with, mine included until I actually looked, is four planeswalker pairs and one pair of legendary creatures wearing a famous name.
There’s a second pair further down the list doing the same trick at uncommon: Tinybones, Pocket Nuisance in black and Titanbones, Towering Heart in green. Skeleton Rogue and Skeleton Druid. I find Titanbones much funnier than I should.
The collector numbers are worth a look too, because they give away structure that nobody announced. Every one of those character cards sits between 195 and 266, sorted by color, with the rest of the set numbered normally below it. Ajani Resolute is 195, Liliana the Faultless is 200, Chandra’s blue version is 212, the black cards cluster in the 229 to 237 range, red at 242 and 244, green at 259 and 266. That’s a bonus sheet. Same shape as Mystical Archive in Strixhaven, just with pairs instead of singles.
Jace breaks the pattern, which makes sense given he caused all this. The Theorist, Jace Beleren is collector number 43, right in the main set, and he has five separate printings catalogued including a Japan showcase with an inverted frame at 405. He’s the villain, so he gets to be a mythic in the normal run instead of a character on the sheet.
Only Chandra is an actual reprint
This is the part that changed my read on the whole set.
I went through every one of those character cards with --prints expecting to find a stack of old printings getting a fresh run. Ajani Resolute: one set, Reality Fracture. Garruk, Curse Breaker: one set. Garruk, Veiled Butcher: one set. Liliana the Repentant, Liliana the Faultless, Ajani Unrelenting, The Theorist Jace Beleren: all Reality Fracture only. Brand-new cards, every one.
The single exception is Chandra, Torch of Defiance, which is a genuine reprint of the Kaladesh card and is currently sitting at $2.97 non-foil, $10.88 in Kaladesh foil.
So when people say the original side of each pair is “the original,” they mean the original character in their canonical color, not a reprint of a card you own. Ajani Resolute is a new white Ajani. Garruk, Curse Breaker is a new green Garruk. The only card in your binder getting a supply hit from this set is a nine-year-old Chandra that already has six paper printings and sits under $3.
I keep wanting to be more worried about this than I am. The reflex when a set announces five famous planeswalkers is to go check what you’re holding and start listing things. I did exactly that on Friday night, pulled my Garruks out, and then realized I was reacting to a reprint wave that isn’t happening.
Though. Okay, one caveat I don’t want to skate past. New cards can hurt old cards without reprinting them, and this set is aimed straight at the Commander slot those old walkers occupy. Garruk, Primal Hunter is about $2.26 and has been drifting down for years. If Garruk, Curse Breaker is a better five-mana green Garruk, Primal Hunter doesn’t get reprinted, it just gets replaced, and the price goes the same direction either way. Ajani, Adversary of Tyrants at $2.17 is in the same boat. The floor on both of those is already so low that I’m not sure the distinction matters in dollar terms, which is maybe why I talked myself out of caring.
Liliana of the Veil is the one I’d genuinely keep an eye on, at $7.08 in the Innistrad Remastered printing. Not because a one-mana white Liliana Cleric competes with her, obviously it doesn’t, but because Liliana demand in Commander is spread across a lot of versions and adding two more splits it further.
Tinybones, Trinket Thief is the sneaky one at $18.11. It’s a real Commander card with a real deck built around it, and Reality Fracture is printing a new Tinybones at uncommon. Uncommon. That’s a lot of copies of a competing Tinybones for a card that’s held eighteen bucks largely on being the only one.
The watermark is what you’ll actually need when logging this
Back to Ral Zarek for a second.
Ral Zarek, Guest Lecturer in Secrets of Strixhaven, collector number 97, carries the fracture watermark and runs about $1.90. The borderless version at 282 doesn’t have it. The prerelease promo, number 97p, is up at $8.22. So the Echoverse mark was seeded into a set that came out in April, on a card most people filed as a normal Strixhaven legend, and nobody talked about it until Friday.
Every Echoverse card in Reality Fracture carries that same mark. Chandra, Chill of Compliance has it. Chandra, Torch of Defiance doesn’t. That’s confirmed in the Scryfall data already, not a guess from the panel.
Which is going to matter more than it sounds when you’re sorting a box of this stuff in October. You’ll have two cards with the same character name, printed at the same rarity, in the same pack, differing by color and a small symbol behind the text box. Scan both, log both, fine. But when you’re eyeballing a stack to see what you’ve got, the watermark is the fast tell, and it’s the kind of thing that’s easy to miss on a foil under bad light. I’ve already resigned myself to mis-sorting at least a dozen of these before it becomes muscle memory. My track record with alternate-art and foil identification is not spotless.
So yeah, sorting. October. Two Chandras per pack, same rarity, one’s red one’s blue, and I’m going to be sitting there at eleven at night going “wait, did I already log this one, or was that the other one.” You know how it goes. Every set has one thing that breaks your rhythm and this is Reality Fracture’s.
What I’m doing between now and October 2
Not much, honestly, and that’s the useful conclusion here rather than a disappointing one.
I’m not selling old Garruks or Ajanis. They’re two-dollar cards. The transaction costs eat the entire thesis, and if I’m wrong about the demand shift I’ve sold a playset of Commander staples to net four dollars.
I am flagging Tinybones, Trinket Thief, because eighteen dollars is enough money to be worth a decision and an uncommon competitor is a real threat. If it’s still at eighteen in September I’ll probably move mine.
The Bloodline Recollector preorder is sitting at $89.99 for the base mythic, which is the number I’d point at if you asked me where the hype is concentrated right now. Preorder prices on in-universe sets have been consistently the worst window of the cycle, and I say that as someone who bought two Lorwyn Eclipsed collector boxes at preorder and watched them slide fifteen percent by week three. I have not learned anything from this. I will probably do it again in September.
And I’m going back through my Secrets of Strixhaven cards to see what else has that watermark on it, because if Ral Zarek was seeded, there’s a decent chance he wasn’t the only one. I don’t actually know how many there are. That seems like a thing somebody should have counted by now.