Ten years ago, Magic: The Gathering’s heroes faced one of the greatest threats in the history of the Multiverse: the Eldrazi called Emrakul. As told in 2016’s Eldritch Moon set, they succeeded in imprisoning the reality-breaking, Lovecraftian monster within Innistrad’s moon — but not because they actually defeated her. The incomprehensible, primordial being actually seized control of the Planeswalker Tamiyo and forced her to cast a forbidden spell that sealed itself away for reasons no one could understand. Now, with the threat of the Echoverse looming in the upcoming Reality Fracture set, Emrakul has awoken.
An apparent sponsored Instagram ad from Wizards of the Coast earlier this week prematurely revealed Emrakul, the Exigent Doom, a new card that confirms the Eldrazi titan’s return. While Emrakul has appeared on cards since Eldritch Moon, this marks her first new card tied to an actual storyline in a decade — and suggests her brief appearance in the ongoing Reality Fracture fiction is setting up something much bigger.
Previews for Reality Fracture began last week with a series of short stories, along with the set’s official debut on Sept. 8. Together, they’ve clarified what’s going on in the new set’s story. After years spent facing deadly foes like Nicol Bolas, the Phyrexians, and the Eldrazi, the powerful blue mage Jace Beleren attempted to rewrite the Multiverse from within the Meditation Realm. The spell failed and destroyed his body, but pieces of his consciousness survived.
The fragments used the power of the Meditation Realm to construct a new body. One piece, the Theorist, took control and created the Echoverse, an entirely separate Multiverse that he intends to use to overwrite the existing one. The Echoverse contains copies of every plane, but Jace has removed the people and events he considers responsible for the original reality’s greatest suffering, while replacing countless others with different, seemingly hollow versions.
“The Eldrazi don’t exist in this Multiverse. Nor does Bolas, the Phyrexians,” the Theorist tells his protégé Tam in episode 6. Emrakul, he adds, will be “eliminated, like all planar threats.”
Vraska, Chandra, Ajani, and Garruk have begun venturing into Jace’s memory-prisons to collect the more compassionate pieces of his psyche, hoping they can stop the Theorist from within. Meanwhile, Tam has started to question whether a painless world is worth destroying everyone she knows, including her former classmates at Strixhaven.
While measuring Innistrad in episode 4 so it can be reproduced within the Echoverse, Tam tests the limits of her telepathic powers after hearing rumors about a “monster inside the moon.” When she reaches out, her consciousness is pulled into a nightmarish psychic space where Emrakul poses as a sickly humanoid figure lying in a bed. Then she looks up: “The ceiling is a gradient of cloudy black, and behind that black is an endless writhing of organs and tentacles and flesh-ribbons that undulate and tighten, prodding at the barrier that separates them, feeling for its edges.”
Emrakul describes herself as a cosmic gardener who can “prune worlds” that threaten the larger wilderness of existence, and she even implies that she locked herself up to let her hunger build, making her next feast that much more delicious. “I smell that you know not just of a sickly tree … but of an entire forest,” Emrakul says, offering to devour it. “Show me where your Multiverse is, coveter of life, and I will rid you of it.”
Tam quickly escapes the encounter, but her encounter with Emrakul offers a major clue about how this story might end. The heroes have learned that destroying Jace’s replacement body could stop or slow the Echoverse’s expansion, which is why they’re collecting fragments of his psyche. Emrakul, however, may be the only being capable of actually destroying the Echoverse.
The leaked card — Emrakul, the Exigent Doom — seems to indicate that she will escape the moon and make a full return in some capacity. The 10-mana, colorless Eldrazi is a 12/12 with flying and trample, while its ward ability forces an opponent to sacrifice three permanents to target it. Casting Emrakul also untaps every land its controller controls, potentially refunding its entire cost and leaving plenty of mana available for another massive spell.
For three mana, players can also exile Emrakul from their hand to give a land the ability to tap for two colorless mana. Emrakul can then be cast from exile later. The design neatly mirrors her place in the story: imprisoned somewhere beyond reach until the moment she finally emerges. The 2016 card Imprisoned in the Moon depicts Emrakul’s original containment and transforms an opponent’s creature into a land, so there’s some nice design symmetry here as well.
Emrakul remains trapped inside Innistrad’s moon for now, but the latest short story released on Sept. 9 hints further at Emrakul being the key to stopping the Echoverse.
“There is someone who can help in just the right way,” a Jace fragment called the Soldier thinks during episode 8, vowing to ask for help as he turns to look at the moon. That story ends with the Theorist learning how to merge realities and beginning that process, so it’s starting to feel inevitable that Emrakul will be unleashed at some point during the remaining two episodes.
