Empower Jace Explained: Reality Fracture Turns Jace Into a Planeswalker Token

Of everything Wizards showed during Tuesday’s Reality Fracture debut, Empower Jace was the mechanic that made me stop and read the card text again.

The mechanic shows up on cards like Protege’s Awakening, a four-mana blue sorcery with Empower Jace 6 followed by “Draw a card.” What takes a second to process is what those three words actually mean: Magic is now giving players a dedicated Jace planeswalker token, then asking them to build its loyalty throughout the game. Some Reality Fracture cards can even give that token new abilities along the way, which is where a fairly simple mechanic starts opening some much stranger doors.

Wizards is calling Empower Jace the marquee mechanic of Reality Fracture, and considering how central Jace is to the set’s story, that makes sense. Rather than sticking him on one mythic rare and calling it a day, Jace becomes a recurring piece of the set’s actual gameplay, showing up across multiple cards instead of being confined to one headline planeswalker.

What Does Empower Jace Do?

When a card tells you to Empower Jace X, you put that many loyalty counters on a Jace planeswalker token you control.

If you do not already control one, you create a blue Jace planeswalker token first and then put the specified number of loyalty counters on it. If you already have a Jace planeswalker token, the new counters simply go onto the token you already control.

The basic Reality Fracture Jace token has two abilities:

• −1: Surveil 1

• −3: Draw a card

The token starts with 0 loyalty on its own, so the Empower effect is what actually gets it up and running.

For example, if a spell says Empower Jace 6 and you do not have a Jace token yet, you create one and put six loyalty counters on it. You could immediately spend one loyalty to surveil, spend three to draw a card, or leave the counters alone and continue building Jace as the game goes on.

The basic play pattern is easy enough. The more interesting part is what counts as a Jace token in the first place.

Empower Jace Can Work With Other Jaces, Sort Of

My first assumption was that Empower Jace would only care about the special token created by Reality Fracture. Wizards went a little further than that.

A token copy of another Jace planeswalker also qualifies.

That distinction matters. A normal Jace planeswalker card sitting on your battlefield does not count, but if some other effect creates a token copy of that Jace, Empower Jace can put loyalty counters onto the token.

That immediately gives the mechanic more room than the basic token suggests. Instead of always piling loyalty onto a Jace whose main options are surveilling and drawing a card, players can potentially create token copies of older Jace planeswalkers and use Empower effects to load those versions with loyalty instead.

There are enough moving pieces involved that I am not ready to call that competitive, broken or anything else after one afternoon of previews. It is, however, exactly the sort of interaction Magic players are going to start poking at the moment Reality Fracture cards become available.

A mechanic that puts extra loyalty on planeswalker tokens was never going to stay innocent for long.

The Basic Jace Token Is Only the Starting Point

One thing that stood out during the reveal is how intentionally simple the default Jace token is.

Surveil 1 costs a loyalty counter. Drawing a card costs three. Neither ability adds loyalty back to Jace, which means the token will eventually run itself empty unless you keep playing cards that Empower it.

Protege's Awakening is only one example. Tuesday's reveal also put Empower Jace on cards including Way of the Pyromancer and Way of the Cryomancer, and Wizards says the mechanic appears at every rarity, including common.

That appears to be the point of the design. Empower Jace is not simply a way to create a planeswalker once. It is the fuel system for a planeswalker that you keep developing throughout the game.

Some Reality Fracture cards take that concept another step by giving your planeswalkers additional loyalty abilities.

Way of the Pyromancer, for example, Empowers Jace when it enters and then gives planeswalkers you control a +1 ability that produces red mana. That immediately fixes one of the default token’s biggest limitations because Jace suddenly has a way to increase his own loyalty.

Way of the Cryomancer uses the same basic structure but gives planeswalkers a different ability tied to copying an instant or sorcery.

That is where Empower Jace became more interesting to me during the reveal. The token is not necessarily the finished product. It is a blank enough starting point that the cards around it can change what kind of planeswalker you are actually playing with.

Can You Have More Than One Jace Token?

Yes, although repeatedly casting Empower Jace cards usually will not produce an army of them.

The Reality Fracture Jace token is not legendary, so the legend rule does not prevent you from controlling multiple copies. The catch is that if you already control a Jace planeswalker token, another Empower Jace effect normally adds loyalty to that token rather than creating a new one.

You would need another effect to create additional Jace tokens or token copies of Jace planeswalkers.

If you do manage to control more than one, you choose which Jace token receives the loyalty counters when an Empower effect resolves. That could become particularly relevant if one token is the basic Reality Fracture Jace while another is a copy of a more powerful Jace card.

At that point, the decision becomes a little more interesting than deciding whether you want to surveil.

Why Is Jace Everywhere in Reality Fracture?

Reality Fracture is built around Jace Beleren and the Echoverse, the artificial reality he created based on his idea of what the Multiverse should have been.

The set could have represented that with another major Jace planeswalker card and plenty of story references, but Empower Jace puts him directly into normal games instead. Wizards has said the mechanic appears across multiple rarities, including common, which means players should encounter it regularly in Limited rather than only when someone opens a specific rare or mythic.

That fits the story better than I expected it to.

Jace is not simply another character visiting the setting. His decisions created the setting. Turning him into something players repeatedly create, empower and modify makes him feel like part of Reality Fracture’s structure rather than another legendary character sitting inside it.

Whether anyone actually wants that much Jace in their draft is a different conversation.

Is Empower Jace Good?

It is far too early to make a serious call on Constructed.

Reality Fracture previews have just started, and we still do not know the full group of cards designed to support Empower Jace. Judging the mechanic now would be a little like judging an engine after Wizards has shown us half the parts.

For Limited, the picture is clearer. If Empower Jace appears throughout the set, managing that loyalty should become one of Reality Fracture’s recurring gameplay decisions. Spending three counters to draw a card is attractive, but doing it too quickly could leave you without enough loyalty to take advantage of another card that gives Jace a stronger ability.

Constructed and Commander are harder to predict. The basic Jace token is useful, but useful is not the same thing as worth building a deck around. The individual Empower cards still need to be good Magic cards on their own.

The interaction with token copies of older Jace planeswalkers is the part I would keep watching. That is the wrinkle that takes Empower Jace from a neat Limited mechanic to something deck builders may eventually have a reason to get weird with.

After one day of previews, I am not convinced Empower Jace is powerful yet. I am convinced it is much more interesting than “make a Jace token and draw some cards,” which is probably a pretty good place for a new mechanic to start.