There’s been a lot of buzz about the Reality Fracture story, and let me tell you—it’s fantastic. So good. Haven’t been reading Magic story and want to know how to catch up? I’m here to help!

Reality Fracture will cap off a 3-year (12 set) story which is split into three sub-arcs:

Reality Fracture Arcs

The Omenpath Arc

The Dragonstorm Arc

The Echoverse Arc

What to read?

If you want to fully catch up, read the main stories for all 12 of the sets. All of them can be found in the story archive on the mothership —it’s sorted by year, Wilds of Eldraine starts in 2023. The earlier sets in each arc (e.g Wilds of Eldraine, Bloomburrow, Edge of Eternities) tend to be more disconnected from the larger arc, whereas the final sets in each arc (Outlaws of Thunder Junction and Tarkir: Dragonstorm) tend to focus more on progressing the overarching story.

You can read the side stories also, but they tend to not have overarching story relevance. They’re often fantastic bits of worldbuilding though! There’s one exception, which I mention below: the Zimone side story for SOS, The Math of More, seeds some important ideas for Reality Fracture.

If you prefer audiobooks, all of the main story episodes have voiced narration linked in each of the story episode articles. They were historically done by in-house Wizards employees, but starting with EOE they’ve been hiring professional voice actors/narrators to do the audio.

The Essentials

If you want to minimize the amount you need to read, I believe the following are mandatory for understanding what’s going on:

Obviously, jumping into Episode 6 for DFT/TDM/SOS will be a bit jarring, but you can probably figure out much of it from context. This isn’t my recommendation, but I believe these are the bare minimum stories you should read before diving into episode 1 of Reality Fracture

Chef’s Special

Personally, I’d recommend reading the stories for OTJ, DFT, TDM, and SOS in full, but the above linked episodes are the crucial ones. ECL’s main story is intended to lead directly into SOS, so while it’s not strictly plot-relevant, it is worth reading if you’d like a fuller characterization of SOS’s protagonists.

Side stories aren’t usually connected to the overarching plotline, but The Math of More sets up a lot of concepts and themes that Reality Fracture builds on, so I do recommend reading it.

EOE’s story is very disconnected and is pretty skippable, though it does play in some space that becomes relevant for Reality Fracture. If you really just want to dive into FRA, then go ahead and skip EOE, but Seth Dickinson did such an incredible job writing the story for the set that I’d recommend reading it regardless

Background Reading

For important Jace background, you should ideally also read Absent Minds from Origins and the Ixalan arc starting with Jace, Alone. I would also recommend the MOM side story Ravnica: One and the Same for Vraska/Jace context, and as a bit of a prologue to the OTJ epilogue.

There’s plenty more Jace and Vraska backstory to explore, and part of what makes Reality Fracture’s story so excellent is how Lührs pulls on decades of Jace stories to craft it. The deeper you get into the man Jace Beleren is, the more you’ll be rewarded. But Absent Minds and the Ixalan arc are definitely the most important and prominent, imo.

The SparkNotes

Alternatively, the quickest way of getting into things would be listening to The Vorthos Cast’s Jummary, which is basically a crash course. If you go this route, I do still recommend reading OTJ Epilogue in its entirety though. It’ll do a lot for some of the impactful moments in Reality Fracture