Reality Fracture Draft: First Impressions
Just a few days ago, I had the privilege of playing Early Access Reality Fracture Limited.
If you've been following my content, you know I had high expectations for this set, on the heels of what I consider one of my least favorite draft formats of all time: The Hobbit.
Many people hyped up how cool Fracture Limited looked. When I finally played it, honestly, I was fairly disappointed.
That's not to say it's not a solid set. I'd rate it as slightly above average, certainly more fun than the last two sets. However, I was hoping for an all-timer and instead got a format that was just solid.
Fracture is not a blisteringly-fast set, though once the set hits the gen pop, people will likely figure out how to draft the aggressive decks better.
Empower Jace is the talk of the town, and with good reason. It's a mechanic that saves this set for Limited. Most of the cards, by design, are pushed in the Limited space, which pushes out the archetypes a bit.
When I'm in Temur colors, I mostly feel that's the direction I want to go, despite it being Simic's mechanic.
Following the pattern for other decks, like Dimir Self-Mill and Golgari Death Touch, trample didn't pan out.
I haven't detected a massive color imbalance yet. I prefer drafting blue to any other color because of the Empower Jace mechanic. That's my general preference going into any slower set because blue has access to the most card advantage. If I'm not getting run over, I have time to set up and draw extra cards. So that's not imbalance. It's more so preference intertwined with the color pie doing its job.
Initially, I felt like I knew who won the games on the first few turns, despite the games going long. I also think my decks were quite weak in the beginning.
One set "mechanic" I'm unsure about is the "twins" in every pack. Every pack will have a card that has its twin. This means that as you develop an understanding of the format, you'll often be able to tell what the person feeding you took if they take either half of the twin pair, which are uncommons and rares, so it happens frequently.
Let's take a look at a few of my decks and see how they improved over time.
This Boros deck was my first draft of the format. I could have drafted better, as I barely read the draft commons before the event and didn't have a plan.
Ultimately, as you can see, the plan became Rescue Girl and Warrior's Blades. Rescue Girl is an interesting card because it can feel like the best or worst card in your deck. While it's easy to get stuff like Blades to combo with it, it's a below-rate, fragile creature that requires more cards to see its full potential and potentially a lot of mana. I love the card, but drafting around it won't be optimal.
White felt like the weakest color but not by a substantial amount.
I think I won a single game with this deck, but I performed badly during my "just reading the cards" phase of figuring it out.
My second deck was extremely underpowered. This deck looked like it had some of the tools to win a game or two, but I think I went 0-2 before just starting a new draft. This is a normal deck with a decent curve and soft synergies between the black self-mill creatures.
Without premium removal and any higher-power cards, it's hard to overwhelm your opponent with a deck like this.
Rakdos is a reasonable archetype. However, you want to focus on synergies and get many of the enablers and payoffs for the "ping" archetype. Otherwise, you risk running out of gas against decks with more Empower Jace that draw a lot of cards and win a resource battle.
At this point, I had a few more low-power, underwhelming decks and decided I was going to try and push the boundaries and soup it up.
I started this draft with a pick-one-pack-one Tenured Tethermage. I leveraged it into splashing a bunch of colors with some dual lands and cards, like Arcane Amphisbaena, that made the game go long. The "Way of" cards overperformed, and I plan to take those more aggressively now, which I was not doing initially.
Face Yourself was a card I wasn't sure about, but it massively overperformed in this deck. I could often cast it from slightly behind with an Empowered Jace token in play, which meant I kept the creature tokens I created. I turned games where I was behind into a game state that was, at a bare minimum, at parity.
This set is slow enough that you can draft decks for power level and go back to the "soup" decks like in Strixhaven. This time, it's not just a pile of removal. We have to create a cohesive plan. This deck overperformed, only losing to the Splinter Twin combo. I tried to draft this, as evident by my sideboard, but someone else at my table also opened a Splinter Twin and got all the combo pieces. After seeing Splinter Twin on the bonus sheet and a direct combo with a reskinned Pestermite at common, I became pretty excited at the set's prospects. This will be a combo we see more often than you'd think because it's legitimately a good combo that's easy to put together when Splinter Twin is opened.
The last deck I'll go over is this Jund deck. There aren't any truly broken rares or anything, but this deck had all the tools I want. While I had planned on a Golgari deck, I picked up a late Kiora of Fire and Ashes with a couple of dual lands ready to go. I decided to push the set's bounds and double splash it off of Heartwood tokens and other fixing.
This worked out better than I thought. Kiora won me almost every game I played. It's an uncommon that plays like a good rare and a card I'll be aggressive about taking.
I liked the synergy of Jiang Yanggu, Never Alone with Heartwood tokens allowing me to pump Tenured Tethermage multiple times a turn or to just sink extra mana into Kiora.
Paradox Shaper overperformed as well. This creature can self-fulfill milling yourself out and getting to zero cards, allowing you to draw the best card in your graveyard every turn. A pair of them is ideal to loop each other against removal. If you can stabilize and compete in a long game, Paradox Shaper is an excellent win condition for that deck style.
Overall, I started to enjoy the format more as I ignored the drawn-out archetypes and focused on splashing around and taking the most powerful card within a few reasonable colors. Splashing felt great, and almost necessary, rather than something I'd want to avoid if my mana wasn't ideal like in The Hobbit.
The set will be out full swing this week. We even have Arena Directs and Arena Limited Champs Qualifiers coming up for this set, so I'll focus all my Magic energy on Limited. I'm curious about Standard these days, so maybe I'll check that out when the events are over.
Even though the set's archetypes are underwhelming, it's still fun, but just not one I'll consider an all-timer like I was hoping.
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