MTG Empower Jace mechanic explained | Reality Fracture's new ability
Wizards had a real problem on their hands designing Reality Fracture. You can print a hundred Phyrexian cards because Phyrexians are a whole faction. Jace is one guy. So how do you make a common card feel like Jace without stamping out forty different Jace planeswalkers at forty different rarities?
The answer is the Empower Jace mechanic, and it's the backbone of the entire set. I pulled a card straight from the preview, Avatar of Burgeoning Echoes, to walk through exactly how it works, plus what the designers said about building it and one rules interaction Commander players specifically need to know about.
What is the Empower Jace mechanic?
Empower Jace builds you a Jace planeswalker token instead of the creature army token you'd get from a normal amass card.
Mark Rosewater, Magic's head designer, explained it during the preview: the team was already doing a lot of "what-if" experiments for this set, so designer Jeremy Geist took the amass mechanic (the one that made zombie army tokens back in War of the Spark) and asked what would happen if it made a planeswalker instead of a creature. Not just any planeswalker either. Specifically Jace.
The card reads it out in plain terms. Avatar of Burgeoning Echoes triggers landfall: whenever a land you control enters, empower Jace 2. The card's own reminder text spells out exactly what that means: put two loyalty counters on a Jace token you control, and if you don't control one yet, first create a blue Jace planeswalker token with "T: Surveil 1" and "T: Draw a card."
How does Empower Jace actually work?
Every Jace token comes with two built-in abilities regardless of which card made it: minus 1 to surveil 1, and minus 3 to draw a card. That's the whole kit, two ways to spend loyalty and nothing else attached.
Here's the sequence in practice. Cast or trigger an Empower Jace card and check the board:
No Jace token in play? You create one, and it enters with loyalty equal to the Empower number on that card.
Already have a Jace token? Skip the new token, just add that many more loyalty counters to the one you've got.
Play Avatar of Burgeoning Echoes, then play a land. That land trigger reads empower Jace 2, so you get a fresh Jace token sitting at 2 loyalty. Play a second land that turn, or on a future turn, and instead of a second Jace showing up, your existing one just climbs to 4 loyalty. Keep the lands coming, and that Jace token turns into a real card-advantage engine, since minus 3 for a card draw is suddenly very affordable once you're sitting on a stack of loyalty from repeated landfall triggers.
Rosewater also pointed out why this design works so cleanly for limited play: getting a third or two-thirds of a card off a single activation keeps things balanced while still making planeswalkers matter a lot more than they historically have in draft, without the wide power ceiling War of the Spark had when every color could go wide on planeswalkers.
The token-only rule Commander players need to know
Empower Jace only adds loyalty to Jace tokens, never to an actual nontoken Jace planeswalker card sitting on your battlefield.
This came up directly in the Q&A. Someone asked whether Empower Jace still creates a new token if you already control a real, non-token Jace planeswalker. The answer was yes, because Empower Jace specifically targets token planeswalkers. Early in development, the design team actually let Empower Jace add loyalty to any Jace, including your named ones, and it turned out to be broken, so they locked the mechanic to tokens only.
That's not a dead end for Commander deckbuilders though. Blue has a long history of making token copies of permanents, and Reality Fracture keeps that door open on purpose. If you're running a Jace that makes a token copy of itself (Jace, Cunning Castaway does exactly this on its ultimate), that copy counts as a Jace token, and Empower Jace cards will absolutely pile loyalty onto it. If your commander or a support piece can make token copies of Jace, this mechanic gets a lot more interesting than "just another common."
Way of the Blank: pushing planeswalkers down to uncommon
Reality Fracture also includes ten Way of the "Blank" enchantments, and each one does two things at once: it empowers Jace, and it grants all your planeswalkers a shared activated or static ability.
Planeswalkers have historically lived at rare and mythic, so getting planeswalker-matters payoffs down to uncommon is new territory for the set. Avatar of Burgeoning Echoes actually does something similar on a creature body: on top of the landfall trigger, it grants every planeswalker you control "T: Put a +1/+1 counter on target creature for each land you control." Stack that with a few landfall triggers and a wide board, and your Jace token stops being a value engine and starts closing games.
Did the Empower Jace mechanic actually test well?
It tested better than anything else in the set, according to the design team.
Rosewater said Empower Jace got more positive feedback during playtesting than any other mechanic they tried for Reality Fracture, calling it their number one favorite result from testing. People were skeptical going in. Making planeswalker tokens at common was never done before in Magic's history, and a lot of playtesters questioned it on paper. The design team says that skepticism disappeared after one game, and the mechanic just felt natural once people saw a Jace token actually working on their board.
That popularity shows up elsewhere in the set too. The Brain Twister collector treatment, inspired by MC Escher, leans directly into what happens when Empower Jace fills your board: multiple Jaces stacked within Jaces, art that makes the whole thing feel deliberately disorienting. It's a treatment that only makes sense because the mechanic generates so many Jaces on board in the first place.
Author:
Greg is the founder of The Cardboard Chronicles, covering Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon, Lorcana, Elestrals, and many more of the world's popular TCGs. Greg has been playing and collecting Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon for over 2 decades and covers the TCG space daily while running all of the social channels!
Why this mechanic matters beyond limited
Most brand-new set mechanics live and die in limited and never touch a Commander table. This one's different because it's fundamentally a value engine, and value engines always find a home in 100-card decks.
A repeatable minus 1 for Surveil and minus 3 for a card, refillable by any card that says "empower Jace," is exactly the incremental card advantage Commander decks are built to abuse over a long game. Pair it with anything that makes token copies of planeswalkers, and you've got an engine that keeps paying off well past turn ten, which is precisely the kind of build-around I go looking for when a new mechanic drops.
Empower Jace mechanic FAQ
What does the Empower Jace mechanic do?
Empower Jace is a twist on the amass mechanic that creates or grows a blue Jace planeswalker token instead of a creature army. If you don't control a Jace token, the triggering card creates one with loyalty equal to its Empower number. If you already have one, it just adds that many more loyalty counters.
What abilities does an Empower Jace token have?
Every Jace token created by the mechanic has two built-in abilities: minus 1 to surveil 1, and minus 3 to draw a card.
Does Empower Jace work on a real Jace planeswalker, not just tokens?
No. Empower Jace only adds loyalty counters to Jace tokens. It was originally designed to work on any Jace, but the design team found that version broken and restricted it to tokens only during development.
Can Empower Jace work with Jace, Cunning Castaway's token copy?
Yes. If Jace, Cunning Castaway's ultimate creates a token copy of itself, that copy is a Jace token, so any Empower Jace effect will add loyalty to it normally.
What are the Way of the Blank enchantments?
Way of the Blank is a cycle of ten enchantments in Reality Fracture. Each one empowers Jace and also grants every planeswalker you control a shared ability, pushing planeswalker-matters effects down to uncommon for the first time.
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