Reality Fracture Vision Design Handoff, Part 2
This article exposes the original Vision Design handoff for Hexhaven, an alternate version of Strixhaven featured in Reality Fracture. Discover how the ally-colored military colleges and the brand-new empower Jace mechanic were built to shape the set's high-stakes narrative.
- Hexhaven reimagines Strixhaven as an ally-color military academy rather than enemy-color colleges.
- The five military colleges are Fatehold, Theorix, Stingerquill, Konstrari, and Vigorbloom.
- Magecraft was originally slated to return in blue, black, and red before being cut.
- Empower Jace modifies the amass mechanic to build Jace planeswalker tokens instead of Armies.
Military Colleges of Hexhaven
To highlight the alternate-reality theme of Reality Fracture, the Vision Design team created Hexhaven. While Strixhaven focused on enemy-colored academic colleges, Hexhaven flips the concept into an ally-colored military academy. Each college kept one core color while shifting its secondary color, turning the original factions into Fatehold (White/Blue), Theorix (Blue/Black), Stingerquill (Black/Red), Konstrari (Red/Green), and Vigorbloom (Green/White).
Instead of unique mascot tokens for each faction, all five colleges generate 2/2 colorless Cadet creature tokens to push the unified military theme. Set design tweaked early spells like Germinate Recruits to generate fleets of Cadets rather than loading counters onto single targets. The draft archetypes treat these Cadet tokens as a shared resource that each color pair leverages differently.
Mechanic Shifts and Spell Designs
Vision Design initially planned to bring back the magecraft mechanic for blue, black, and red, putting it on cards like Baral, Disgraced Authority. However, because magecraft was stripped out of the preceding Strixhaven set during design, the team ultimately dropped the keyword from Hexhaven entirely to maintain mechanical consistency across releases.
Prepared spells also made a return, appearing in a vertical cycle across the colleges. Red-green received a major shift during development; while the initial concept offered temporary Treasures, the set design team invented Heartwood tokens that tap for red or green mana. Cards like Arcane Amphisbaena preserved their core Vision Design structure almost entirely intact into the finalized release.
Building Jace's Illusion Army
To reflect Jace's narrative takeover of the Multiverse, Vision Design adapted the amass keyword into empower Jace. Instead of amassing an Army token, cards with this mechanic place loyalty counters on a Jace planeswalker or create a specialized Jace Echo planeswalker token with built-in loyalty abilities.
Early vision designs allowed cards like Jace's Cancellation to feed loyalty counters directly into true planeswalker cards, but Set Design ultimately dialed back that capability. Additionally, an experimental common cycle of Relentless creatures - such as Relentless Dogs, Relentless Reptiles, and Relentless Roots - was condensed during design down to a single card, Sphinx's Approach, to conserve space for future sets.
