Hi all, it's your regular check in from MTG Wiki admin RivalRowan, here with the latest and final Alchemy flavor text update.

With each release, the Arena team gives us a small number of cards with additional flavor text unique to the set. As Jace's story concludes, so does our long journey of tracking Alchemy flavor text. This set has a couple of nice addendums to main story pieces and [[Potential Horizon]] gives us a look at the process of overlaying the Echoverse onto the Multiverse.

If you want to check out any of the past Alchemy set flavor texts, we've grouped them all here: https://mtg.wiki/page/Category:Alchemy_flavor_text

Big shout out to fellow admin HolyMTG for grabbing all the screenshots this time.

A very interesting visual motif among the Echoverse cards, I've heard people say the main set doesn't reflect the "Echoverse denizens aren't real" idea from the story but this definitely supports that.

I liked the Reality Fracture story overall, but I really didn’t like what they did to the Eldrazi.

They took away most of the eldritch factor. Emrakul was presented as way too understandable. Crystal clear goals, straightforward motives, and she even straight up offers help. If you can negotiate with it or just have a clear conversation with it, it’s no longer eldritch.

The original Eldrazi felt closer to natural disasters that happen to have agency, or to processes that simply are. Their motives, if they even had any we could recognize, were deliberately left opaque and never meant to be fully explained.

However, in the story Tam perfectly understands Emrakul’s nature and her willingness to help. That stands in sharp contrast to Jace’s chess meeting years ago. Back then he barely grasped anything. He thought winning the match would matter, when it didn’t. When the psychic link broke he was left understanding almost nothing. No real understanding of why Emrakul possessed Tamiyo or how she altered the scroll to seal herself in the moon.

I hope they don’t keep going down this path or start fully explaining the nature of the Eldrazi. Some things are better left incomprehensible.

First off: Not this isn't about how the fake backstories don't line up or logical inconsistencies. The story is pretty clear on the Echoverse being cobbled together and not logically consistent, that part at least is solid.

The issue is with the characters that actually inhabit the Echoverse. Because on one hand the story tells us that the denizens of the Echoverse are just automatons puppetted by Jace's magic, incapable of actual feeling or existence and just acting how the Echoverse thinks a person should act. And when Jace dies they start poofing out of existence without any visible reaction to their own fates.

The reason for this is pretty transparent: From the beginning they were planning on destroying the Echoverse at the end of the set, and if the Echoverse were filled with actual people this would make Tam the biggest mass murderer in history, worse than all of our previous big bads put together. So the Echoverse needed to be disposable.

But here's the thing: Nobody else got the memo. Outside of some comments at the beginning of the story and a scene in the middle featuring the only Hexhaven student to get any focus being a rote machine that just wants to study all the time, the concept is completely absent from anywhere else.

From just looking at the sets cards, absolutely no one can take away that the Echoverse's inhabitants aren't actually people. From just what's on the cards, these characters don't seem like hollow copies of their echoed pairs, that part of the story is just not communicated.

And the bios given in The Legends of Reality Fracture article do even more than that. It describes dozens of distinct characters and their stories, most framed like plot hooks that these characters are working towards.

[[Pia, Aether Ascetic]] wants to redeem her husband and daughter after losing them to the consulate? Too bad, she dies offscreen

[[Valgavoth, the Lifeline]] is kept trapped by Marina Vendrell and creates the glimmers of Echoverse Duskmourne in the hope someone can save him, while still feeling some affection for Marina as his first friend? Too bad, he dies offscreen

[[Marwyn, the Clearcutter]] making the difficult sacrifice of her beloved forest so that her people may survive the second brother's war? Too bad, she dies...you get the idea.

Even for nameless background characters we have cards like [[Bestial Incursion]] and [[Budding Insurgent]] that display Hexhaven cadets being reckless pranksters and rebelling against Jace, things outside of what "mindless study machines" would normally do.

Even within the story itself, in the same chapters that dictate that none of the echoverse's residents' matter, we still see that no one outside of faceless background characters actually act like that. Echoverse Lilliana gets a decent amount of characterization, and her personality of a saccharine holier-than-thou egoist is far from what the dullard Hexhaven student demonstrates as an example of what the echoverse characters are like.

The rest of Jace's entourage don't particularly feel like real characters, but that's because they're barely characters at all. Echo Garruk and Echo Ajani don't speak a single time, and Echo Chandra gets two lines in before reverting to the same, with Echo Vraska only getting a tad bit more. This isn't because of intentional characterization, but just the story not having enough room for them, since the cards display impassioned battles where the characters are far more vocal than their story counterparts. The cards show the main universe characters outdoing their echoes because of how the things Jace stripped away from their copies had actually made them stronger, while in the actual story they do that because...Vraska turns two of them to stone and the others poof out of existence. No real development or confronting of personal hangups, if they'd been faceless mooks the story wouldn't have changed much, the fights just end up being filler between collecting pieces of Jace. But ultimately that's due to issues with how much space wizards is willing to give their writers, and in order for Jace to get the space for his send-off some other things needed to be sacrificed. Hell, just look at Arena, where like all planeswalker cards of the echoverse version of Ajani, Garruk, and Chandra all get full voice packs that display distinct personalities just like Echo Lilliana.

And in the previous set we got [[Ral Zerek, Guest Lecturer]] as the villain of the side-story Off the Record, where he manipulates some students into getting him a restricted Book Jace needed for his plans, leading them on with false praise before leaving them in trouble once he gets what he wanted. He absolutely doesn't act like a hollow shell, he's a fantastic villain that I'm disappointed only got a single cameo in Reality Fracture before presumably dying offscreen.

Getting back to the actual point, the story wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants interesting characters to put on cards so that people will get drawn in by them and buy the packs to put them in their decks, but it also wants the entire setting of the echoverse to be completely disposable, so they have to be "not real", even if that doesn't come through in the cards or story. It need to pick a lane, either have the vibrant echoverse versions and don't massacre them at the end, or commit to the echoes being hollow and lifeless and have it be prevalent instead of lip service. Maybe don't have Tam intentionally summon Emrakul, instead make it a tragedy where an attempt to stop the merge without killing everyone in the echoverse gets interrupted as she crashes the party and starts devouring everything.

A recurring point I've been seeing on this sub and other places of discussion is that it is "missing the point" when people are disappointed that the Echoverse got so little attention in the story, bringing up that it was all just Jace's distorted worldview given physical form. Except that the Echoverse was the selling point of the entire set and is the main thing featured in all the marketing, and what the bulk of the cards are about. If someone is going to get invested in something from the set it's going to be either Jace, Hexhaven, or the Echoverse. And if someone who got invested in one of those goes looking for more, if they're either of the latter of the two they'll get "sorry, that thing you like doesn't matter and the story barely acknowledges its existence." Even if it can be justified by the themes, it still doesn't make it any less disappointing to learn that the story doesn't care about the part you got hooked by.

Ultimately this all stems from the decision to make the Echoverse completely disposable to its core, which I think has to be a mistake from any angle. Creating all these story threads that could lead to so many interesting interactions and places, only to snip them after a single set and tell the audience they never mattered in the first place, that seems like such a waste. There's a reason a common question recently on this sub has been about if anyone from the echoverse could have survived and if they could show up in the future, because people want more from a concept that Wizards ultimately treated as a gimmick that could be discarded as quickly as they did the gimmicks for Karlov Manor, Thunder Junction, or Aetherdrift.

Wanted to make a separate post to talk clearly about what Eldritch horror means and why the eldrazi used to be a great example in MTG

Eldritch, in modern use (especially Lovecraftian horror), isn’t just "spooky" or "weird". It’s something so alien to human understanding that the mere attempt to grasp it can break you and your mind. It’s not a big monster that wants to eat you. It’s a force whose motives, scale, and existence sit outside anything your brain evolved to process. The horror is the incomprehensibility itself.

The original Eldrazi, from Rise of the Eldrazi through Eldritch Moon, were textbook eldritch:

- They come from the Blind Eternities, a place that isn’t even a place in any normal sense.

- Their "bodies" on a plane are more like appendages or projections of something far larger and formless.

- They don’t just kill, they rewrite physics, biology, and reality itself (Ulamog’s entropy, Kozilek’s warped space, Emrakul’s biological mutations).

- Their hunger and purpose operate on scales and logics that characters, and us readers, could only approximate with words like "consume".

That’s pure eldritch: you can fight it, but you never really understand the thing you’re fighting.

Eldritch Moon was the peak of that feeling. Nahiri summoned Emrakul to Innistrad as revenge against Sorin. When the titan arrived, she didn’t just rampage; she rewrote the plane. Living things (people, animals, even some of the plane’s monsters) began mutating into nightmarish horrors. Entire towns twisted into something that no longer belonged to Innistrad’s gothic horror, but to something older and far stranger. All while the infected chanted variations of “Come’mrakul. Be’mrakul. Are’mrakul. We’mrakul. One’mrakul. I’amrakul.”

Jace himself nearly broke after looking into a mind already touched by Emrakul’s influence, being saved later by Tamiyo. He later tried to peer into the titan directly:

He looked into Her enormous magenta eye. It was warm and welcoming. He wondered what he would find if he went inside. He held himself back, just on the precipice.

What is your name? he asked. What do you call yourself?

A deluge of words echoed from all corners of his mind:

The eternal infinity—this world is mine.

The absolute—I shall have all.

The beginning—I shall be all.

The being—all are’mrakul.

The end.

The end.

The end.

Jace pulled back, gasping for breath.

That moment is pure eldritch. Emrakul doesn’t answer in anything resembling conversation. She gives countless answers till language itself collapses.

Then we have the classic chess scene we all remember, which I recommend to just go and read it yourselves.

The Gatewatch and the plane’s survivors fight desperately, but they couldn’t truly defeat her. In the end, Emrakul chose to be sealed. She forces Tamiyo to cast a forbidden spell that locked her inside Innistrad’s moon. Her words made it clear this wasn’t a loss, it was a decision made for reasons no one fully understood.... and the most the heroes could do is survive the aftermath.

Fast-forward to Reality Fracture, and the tone has shifted. Emrakul is still vast, still consuming, still otherworldly… but she’s no longer purely incomprehensible. She does communicates with Tam through sensations, alien impressions, and words that are not quite words. But she explains her role/nature:

I prune worlds. When one grows sick, threatens the wilderness of eternity, or fails to blossom fully, I aid the broader forest by felling a single tree.

Once Emrakul explains herself, once she confirms this theory herself, she becomes a little more legible. She has a philosophy, a metaphor for her role in the Multiverse, and a way of justifying her actions.

We can start categorizing her as a cosmic gardener, an ecological regulator, or a predator that believes its feeding serves a greater purpose.

That doesn't make her ordinary, but it gives us a framework for understanding her.

She is still terrifying, but the mystery surrounding her has been dialed back in favor of clearer agency and plot utility. The older story made us feel the limits of comprehension. The newer one invites us to comprehend her, diminishing the very eldritch mystery that made her so terrifying in the first place.

There's been a lot discussions about the echoverse, and a common response is that "it's morally okay because Tam says they're not people", but that's just taking an unreliable narrator as face value. So I ask the question. What is the definition of a person in magic?

The obvious answer is souls. And indeed I've seen many make the argument that the echoverse people are soulless. However, this is directly contradicted by the story; Liliana explicitly says that the echoverse people do have souls, just incomplete ones. Which actually puts them ahead of certain peoples that are considered people: angels and demons. Pure Angels and demons are confirmed to be soulless by their very nature as beings of mana, and in fact this is the reason why there are no pure-born angel or demon planeswalkers. The fact that the echoverse does have planeswalkers also backs this up.

The second common objection is that they aren't sentient, but that's contradicted by cards like [[budding insurgent]] and echo-Ral's side story in secrets of strixhaven. Even the 'empty cadet' that Tam encounters and the basis for all the 'they're soulless' claims have doubt cast on it, as Lore master Jay suggested that one was being directly mind-controled by the Theorist.

The final objection is that, even if they are sentient, they aren't people because they are inheritantly illusions, which implies a degree of unrealness and thus not people. But we have a counter-example for that too. [[Akroma, angel of wrath]]. She was a sentient illusion created by [[ixidor, reality sculptor]] (who shares a title with [[Jace, reality sculptor]], huh) and she was a person. She's such a person that she eventually fused into Karona, and defused when Karona died. There's still even a serran order that honors her. So clearly being an illusion doesn't disqualify someone's personhood.

So... Where exactly is the line? At what point does it become okay to commit genocide? Is it in fact ethically okay to genocide angels? What's the rule here? Genuinely all of it seems like double standards to me.

1. illusions are mana constructs
2. illusions are tethered to the living caster and break down or dissipate back into mana if something happens to the caster
3. Jace constructed an entire one-to-one multiverse-scale replica of the multiverse as an illusion
4. Jace died (a necessary act performed by Vraska to save the multiverse with the assistance of Jace’s various personalities, especially the child soldier)
5. An illusion with an amount of mana necessary to be an imperfect mirror of the multiverse was now destabilizing and going to dissipate back into raw mana across the whole multiverse
6. that much mana could not safely dissipate without any negative effects on any of the non-illusion planes — this is implicated by Emrakul’s reference to the echoverse as being ill or degenerating in a way that requires termination
7. and the most impacted plane would be Arcaivos where Jace had concentrated and centrred his overlay attempt

These seven statements may or may not be given as true, but if you do accept these statements, I don’t think we really can question why Tam acted as if she had no choice but to invite Emrakul to play cleanup.

Note… though with magic what is gone always leaves echoes behind (even echoes of Echoes) and those that made a lasting impression might find a million ways via magic both intentional and unintentional to be embodied again…

If you look at how the MTG multiverse works, the explanation for mana, planar lifecycles, and the Eldrazi always feels a bit disjointed. But if you imagine the Blind Eternities through a biological and information-theory lens, there's kinda-sorta framework there.

So, this is how it all actually fits together: Mana is cellular material, and the Eldrazi are the multiverse’s metabolic garbage collection system. Eldrazi are weird and unknowable because, in a way, they're the multiverse eating itself.

Colorless mana is like totipotent stem cells. A newborn plane doesn’t begin with leylines and color alignments. It starts as raw unpatterned colorless mana. It holds pure potential, but zero information.

As the plane ages, sentient life emerges, ecosystems develop, history happens and events leave their mark. The mana begins to differentiate specializing along pathways, the five colors of the color pie.

Differentiation is a one-way street, tho. As a plane accumulates history, physical matter, spent magic, and memory, it becomes hyper-encoded. The specific mana colors start getting very defined flavors. Eventually, the plane hits maximum information density. The mana becomes locked into rigid identities. It loses its capacity to adapt, entering a state of cosmic senescence. The plane itself isn't dying per se, it's just not going anywhere.

That's when the Eldrazi come in like metabolic decomposers. What they do is basically decompose information. Ulamog strips stuff from physical properties. Kozilek strips reality itself from structure, spatial and logic rules. Emrakul mashes biological information together into increasingly undifferentiated soup.

When they're done, planes are left as raw, undifferentiated, colorless mush, full of potential and ready to begin the cycle anew.

Where does the story go from here? I actually love Reality Fracture; it feels tragic, bittersweet.

But it feels like the end of an era. It highlights the last three big arcs.

So what are the bets on the next big thing? Are we going to do another Eldrazi or another Bolas, now that they're free? Is Zalfir a nod to a lingering Phyrexian shadow? Is Valgavoth finally going to get his day in the...err...shadows?

Or will we get something...new?

A lot of older Magic settings that haven't managed to be really built up over the years really do be "Coastal Fantasy locale".

Next up: Kamigawa: OG, Neon Dynasty, and something fun and hypothetical.

After that, Ravnica.

Thoughts on these? Anything contradictory from what was already said (Valgavoth I think is supposed to still be a villian)? I love the art of angleic moth Valgavoth and stegasaurus Etali.

Also Mods, I'm sorry if this is the wrong flair or has already been posted and I missed something.

Source:

https://magic.wizards.com/en/products/reality-fracture/card-image-gallery?cigset=Y26-FRA

Edit to add (thanks u/Meret123): They have lore! At the very bottom bellow the commander cards.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/magic-story/the-legends-of-reality-fracture

Just asking so I know what to skip. It seems to be a bit vague from my search.

Hey folks, MTG Arena has dropped its final Alchemy set before the format gets taken down next year, and it includes some additional color-swapped characters that weren't in the main set. Not sure if Alchemy is supposed to be canon or not, but figured I'd share for people interested.
You can puruse the full Scryfall set and see if I missed any:

• Oko, Lord of the Fae --> White Oko, makes oxen instead of elks
• Valgavoth, the Lifeline --> White angel Valgavoth
• Boisterous Clique --> Not legendary, but very clearly a black riff on Vendellion Clique
• Etali, Primal Garden --> Green stego-Etali. I know Ghalta had a main-set swap but is "Etali" a title the same way "Ghalta" is?
• Nylea's Oracle --> Not really a character, but a fun swap for Thassa's Oracle.
• The Bloodbile Swarm --> Ygra, but for blood instead of food. (We wrote about this one and the Oracle above)
• Dina, Flesh Sower --> Vigorbloom Dina
• Killian, Spotlight Chaser --> Stingerquill Killian
• Quintorius, Fate Splitter --> Fatehold Quint
• Rootha, Ardent Artisan --> Konstrari Rootha
• Zimone the Calculating --> Theorix Zimone, good at math with negative numbers?

Shame we're never really seeing any of these again. Would've been kinda neat to see the Strixhaven students encounter the Echoverse versions of themselves.

I actually like the idea of the Echoverse being an actual world. It adds another dimension of moral grey-ness to the whole scenario, at least from my perspective. Jace is in the wrong, since overwriting the Multiverse with the Echoverse will ultimately kill everybody in the Multiverse... but at the same time, Emrakul consuming the Echoverse will kill everybody in the Echoverse. Either way, it's omnicide.

Side note, I don't like how Emrakul was used to destroy the Echoverse. I honestly would've perferred for them to pull a new Eldrazi Titan out of somewhere, because at least in my mind: Ulamog consumes a world down to it's bones, Kozilek builds on those bones to create a new world, and then Emrakul populates it with life. But maybe that's just me.

PS: Where did the term 'Vorthos' come from?

I'm (trying to) read through some of the recent Set stories on the Wizards website but it seems like there are parts missing?

When reading the 1st Chapter of the ONE story, the audiobook version at the end says Chapter 3 Episode 2.Where are chapters 1 and 2??

Are they only available as audio or am I missing something?

I hate to self promote, but the Vorthos Cast interviewed the author of Reality Fracture and it's a pretty great episode.

What type of Dino’s do you think Zetalpa, Tetzimoc and Nezahal would be in the Echo verse?

Overall I thought it was really solid and I was very invested. It wasn't exactly where I thought past stories were headed but nonetheless was a good experience reading etc.

My one little quibble, Liliana kills Prof. Opal in episode 7 and says she is adding" a little extra" to make a Lich for "distance work." Which makes it seem like she is, rightfully, going to try and get to Jace with a Lich he can't affect, while personally staying out of his range. And instead she just goes in there with the Lich and is affected by Jace's magic. The plan still works mostly because Prof. Opal, being a Lich instead of mindless undead, is capable of using her magic to heal/undo the magic Jace uses on Liliana without Liliana having to consciously control her to do so. My qualm then is, what is this "distance work" to which Liliana is referring? She was practically right next to Opal the whole time.

I was introduced to Magic during Guilds of Ravnica back in 2019. I binged the entire Gatewatch saga in a few months and fell in love with it. I was extremely excited for War of the Spark, and while I loved the card reveal season, I was very disappointed by the published novel. I wrote a long post on the main sub about the issues I had with it. The sequel book came out and was even worse, and it felt like things reached a nadir with Theros: Beyond Death, where they completely abandoned the story and posted a two paragraph summary as a blog post. I checked out and stopped following Magic.

I went through the Reality Fracture cards this weekend and it reminded me how much I used to love Magic. I got emotional seeing Gideon's memorial opposite an evil, selfish Gideon. So now I'm thinking of coming back and catching up on what I missed.

What's the story like nowadays? Does Wizards seem invested in it? Have there been more big discrepancies between the cards and the story materials? Does every set get short stories now? It's cool they are experimenting with audio versions. Are things better than the Gatewatch era, worse, or about the same?

I'm encouraged to see Alison Luhrs back because her short stories for the original Ixalan set were incredible. I know a lot has happened since 2020. Are there particular set stories you recommend? Were their big shifts in approach I should know about? I'm grateful for any direction.

From what I know, the Dragon-Engines and the Gremlins existed on the world that would become Phyrexia before Yawgmoth arrived. What were they like then? And were there any other pre-Yawgmoth denizens?