We argue about rate constantly: in deckbuilding, in drafts, in how we think about a game at all.

A few weeks ago I mentioned a game from GenCon I quite liked: Gudnak. This week their designer walks through what happens when you remove mana cost off the cards entirely, and how to balance the rest. Then Dylan Skorish comes at it from the player's side with a first look at Reality Fracture Limited, where the standouts include a 1/1 for one and a six-drop you'll mostly cycle for two.

Let’s get into it.

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No mana. No pay to win. Just tough choices and a tiny battlefield. Gudnak is a 2–4 player tactical card game where your TCG skills meet a 3x3 grid, and how you play matters more than what you bring. Two actions per turn. Nine squares. Twenty card decks. Surely you can’t mess this up too badly. (You can and you will.)

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Take cost out of a card game and something else has to do the balancing. In Gudnak, it's timing, traits, and who a Hero gets to hang out with.

By Tim O’Brien

“There’s no mana in Gudnak. How do you balance it?”

We get asked this all the time. And yeah, fair question!

Quick bit of context: Gudnak is a tactical card game on a 3×3 battlefield with a 20-card deck. After the first turn of the game, you get two actions per turn to deploy fighters, play tactics, and move your dudes around.

So back to the question: “If every fighter costs the same to deploy, what stops you from just playing the best one all the time?”

Gudnak may look like other TCGs (well, except for the square cards), but there’s an important distinction that plays into the balance of it: your deck is also your life. Your win condition is getting a fighter in front of your opponent’s Stronghold when their deck is empty. So every card you draw gives you more options, but also makes you more vulnerable to defeat.

That makes the decision space, and the design space, pretty unusual.

You don’t need to build up mana to play your best Hero. The question is “When should I play it for the most value?” There’s still value in drawing cards and getting more done with your actions, but the focus is on resource allocation. Fun, right? Maybe. Idk, you tell me!

So today, let’s talk about balancing Heroes in Gudnak. Heroes are the fighters that help define your deck. You get five of them during deckbuilding: two power Is, two IIs, and one III. Their abilities can shape your entire game plan.

How do we make those five slots interesting? Surely there aren’t infinite abilities that are equally good. Let’s dive in.

Let’s start with actions. Your normal action budget stays at two per turn after the opening turn, rather than growing as the game goes on. That gives us a useful way to balance Hero abilities: how much can you get done with those two actions?

A fighter with a Deploy ability, like Echoing Specter, arrives on the battlefield and does its thing in the same action. That’s a lot of value packed into one action, so we need to be careful about how much that ability does.

A fighter with an Action ability, like Necromancer, needs you to deploy it and then spend another action on the ability. And because deploying fatigues a fighter, it normally can’t do both on the same turn. Which is rough if it gets killed first.

So we can usually put a stronger effect on an Action ability, but we need to account for using it more than once. Both of these Heroes bring back a power-I fighter. Necromancer can place it in any empty square except an opponent’s Gates; Echoing Specter needs an adjacent empty square. More reach, and repeatable, but you have to wait for it. Neat!

The timing and placement aren’t the only differences, either. Their power and traits matter too.

Notice the sword icon in Echoing Specter’s banner? That means it’s a Soldier as well as a Hero. Necromancer doesn’t have that extra trait. Seems like a small difference, but it gives us quite a bit to work with.

Basic fighters often get +I when attacking a particular trait. Dawnbringer Brute, for example, gets that bonus against Soldiers. In this case, the power-I Brute becomes a II when attacking the Echoing Specter, surviving combat instead of trading evenly. The Brute does not have that same luxury if it decides to attack the Necromancer. Giving a Hero the Soldier trait can put it on the wrong end of that matchup. So the little sword is doing some balance work.

Traits also give tactics something to target. Cannon Shot costs one action and destroys an enemy Soldier or Brute of power I or II in an opponent’s Back Row. Trait, power, and position all have to line up. A Hero with the right trait has one more thing to worry about. Necromancer does not.

And because Cannon Shot is neutral, every faction can bring that threat. That gives us room to push a Hero’s upside while leaving a clear answer. Forgefather, for example, is a power-II Brute that gets +I when attacking or being attacked if you have at least six cards in hand. Pretty beefy! But outside combat, it’s still a II. Leave him in your Back Row and he might as well have “Cannon Shot Me” painted on his beautiful, oblong forehead.

The next thing we look at is who a Hero gets to hang out with. The whole card pool can be overwhelming, but a power-II Hero isn’t competing against every fighter in the game. It’s competing for two slots against other power-II Heroes from its faction and the neutral pool.

You can include neutral cards, but you can’t just mix factions together. That gives us a manageable set of relationships to design around. A Hero’s ability might look pretty modest until you see what the rest of its deck can do with it.

Take the Gloaming. Bringing fighters back is their thing. Beyond the Grave is a Gloaming tactic that can return a power-I Hero, including Echoing Specter, to your hand for zero actions. You still pay to deploy Specter again, but you also get its Deploy ability again. Now that little power-I body comes with another fighter. We have to balance for that tactic being in Gloaming, meaning I power fighters can’t be quite as good as other factions.

Neutral Heroes make this even more interesting. Benefactors adds a Basic power-I fighter from your faction to the top of your deck when deployed. That’s useful anywhere, but it has a particularly good set of friends in the Gloaming. Both Echoing Specter and Necromancer can deploy a power-I Benefactors from your Graveyard, triggering that ability again. Same neutral Hero, a lot more mileage.

Mercenaries gives us a different test. It’s a neutral power-II Hero with +I when attacking Basic fighters, but you have to discard a card from your hand to deploy it. That cost can feel different in a Gloaming deck: discard a power-I fighter and Necromancer may be able to bring it back later. Or immediately, if it’s ready and you have an action left! You still gave up a card in hand, and recovering it takes work. But the faction changes how painful the downside is.

That’s the goal: give each Hero a reason to earn its slot in a particular deck. Neutral Heroes need to offer useful options across factions without becoming the obvious choice in all of them. If one Hero is always better, we haven’t really given you a choice. (btw we don’t always get that right. Looking at you, Cannon Shot).

Beyond the Grave / Brute Force — Two different design levers. Beyond the Grave lets a Gloaming deck reuse a power-I Hero and its Deploy ability. Brute Force instead rewards the individual Hero for having the Brute trait: +I until your next turn, capped at III.

So yeah, balancing Heroes without mana is tricky. We’re looking at when an ability pays off, which matchups a Hero is vulnerable to, and what its buddies enable it to do. The interesting question is whether it earns one of those five slots.

That’s what I like about it. A Hero doesn’t need a bigger number to become a better choice. It needs the right deck and the right moment on the battlefield. 

Tim O'Brien is a designer on Gudnak at Chaotic Great. The game is getting a reprint and its fourth expansion, Guilds of Zarruhk. See the campaign on Gamefound.

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The cards that tell you how this format plays are the ones you'd usually take eighth.

By Dylan Skorish

This year has been a complicated time to be an invested Magic player. The sets keep coming at a lightning pace, but the offerings this year have felt like flashes in the pan. The 2026 set lineup hasn’t had a ton of wins for Limited. Lorwyn Eclipsed and Secrets of Strixhaven were both sets with only five supported color pairs, and both were polarizing. Marvel Super Heroes was deeply color-imbalanced, with solid gameplay but not much replayability. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Hobbit were small sets that wore out their welcome within a handful of drafts.

We’re in desperate need of a win here, folks. I’m generally dedicating my time to really getting into the meat of all the sets that WOTC slops into the trough for me, but this past year there’s felt like a lapse in high-quality Limited to really dig into. I really enjoyed Secrets of Strixhaven as a degenerate who takes a lot of joy in big, splashy control mirrors where you end up counting libraries to see who decks first, but that’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. More and more “Limited sickos” I know have branched out to other formats or even other games, and overall morale has felt low for a while.

However, based on the card file, I think there’s a real chance that Reality Fracture is the set that can usher us out of the gutter. It’s maybe a little presumptuous, but there are some early signs that we might have something of a “banger” on our hands with this one. The commons and uncommons are flexible, the archetypes seem to bleed into one another, and Empower Jace looks like the kind of mechanic that can make even otherwise simple board states surprisingly complicated.

When I’m trying to get an early read on a format, I’m less interested in the obvious bombs than I am in the commons and uncommons that tell me what the set actually wants me to do. Which cards fit into multiple decks? Which innocuous effects suddenly matter because of the mechanics around them? Which cards hint at how the games themselves are going to play out? There are a handful in Reality Fracture that immediately caught my eye, but first we need to lay down some groundwork. The defining mechanic for the set is Empower Jace.

Empower Jace is all over the place, with a smattering in every color. I’d expect that in almost every game of Reality Fracture you play, there will be a Jace token hitting the battlefield. How does it work? If you’re familiar with the Amass mechanic, Empower Jace works similarly. From the Comprehensive Rules:

To empower Jace N means “If you don’t control a Jace planeswalker token, create a blue Jace planeswalker token with 0 loyalty, ‘[−1]: Surveil 1,’ and ‘[−3]: Draw a card.’ Choose a Jace planeswalker token you control. Put N loyalty counters on it.”

Empower Jace is a really fascinating mechanic that is a little difficult to evaluate from zero. Planeswalkers aren’t a common fixture in most games of Limited, and when they are, they’re generally bomb-level mythics that warp the battlefield. Here, the Jace tokens are closer to Clue or Map tokens, but much more interactable. Instead of value sitting safely on the battlefield waiting to be cashed in, your opponent gets a say in whether you ever get to use it.

That creates some genuinely interesting questions. How often is it correct to give up damage against your opponent to prevent them from drawing a card? How much damage are you willing to give up just to stop them from Surveilling 1? When you have a Jace of your own, how aggressively are you supposed to protect it? None of those answers are obvious, and I think that’s going to create some pretty interesting board states and combat situations that are difficult to anticipate without really playing with the cards.

That uncertainty reminds me a little of evaluating the “Ring Tempts You” mechanic from Lord of the Rings, if you remember that set. It turned out that adding that little bit of accruing value to a card brought it up considerably in your draft order. With Empower Jace appearing on 35 cards, this isn’t something we’re going to be able to treat as incidental. They want us to play with it, and generally speaking, I’m inclined to believe the designers when they present something new so boldly to us.

The first card with Empower Jace that really caught my eye when evaluating the set was Hexhaven Battalion.

There is a basic landcycler in every color at common, and Hexhaven Battalion is white’s contribution. I would venture to say Hexhaven Battalion will end up being one of the best commons in the color. Six mana for three 2/2s creates a board state out of nowhere, with the upside we talked about with Empower Jace 2, but the most important text is the basic landcycling.

These basic landcyclers have historically overperformed, allowing you to consistently hit your land drops and enabling splashes while mitigating flood. Adding that flexibility to a strong six-drop—letting it still be relevant for two mana—really allows you to have more oomph into the late game, when you normally wouldn’t be all that excited to stuff six-mana commons into your curve. These are more premium than you think.

More importantly, the landcyclers tell us something about the format as a whole. Between one in every color and 10 common tapped duals, that’s a lot of common cards helping you make your mana work. That’s especially notable in a set that looks pretty intensive on the color pips. I’d expect the mana to be strong in this set, and I’m filing that away as one of the first signs that Reality Fracture might let us get a little greedy.

Blessed Ghoul is the type of card that’s pretty innocuous at first blush. One mana for a 1/1 lifelinker isn’t particularly exciting. It’s especially not exciting to pay four mana total to put it in your hand and play it from your graveyard, but this card might very sneakily be a workhorse.

It’s a lifelinker for a low cost, which is valuable in the Selesnya lifegain archetype. It’s cheap and repeatable sacrifice fodder for the Orzhov Attrition deck. It’s free value when milled over in your Dimir and Golgari decks, which are going to be filling the graveyard. Not to mention, having a recurrable little sucker you can protect your Jace with isn’t too shabby.

That kind of flexibility is exactly what has me interested in this format. Blessed Ghoul isn’t powerful because any one of those things is incredible; it’s powerful because the same unassuming card can participate in a bunch of different systems depending on the deck around it. It’s not super sexy, but where in other sets you might avoid playing this kind of card at all, you might find it ties the room together nicely when you can squeeze every drop of value out of the poor Ghoul.

I wouldn’t necessarily say that it fits super well into a Rakdos deck in this format, but another common shows off that same kind of overlap even better.

Hallway Heckler reads as relatively powerful for a common, and there’s a lot of meat on the bone here. The cross-synergy in some of these common cards is an impressive feat from the design team. To start, the one-mana prepared spell works with all the Rakdos pingers and is an additional prowess trigger in Izzet.

Looting has gotten a little less valuable over the years as the average quality of cards has gone up; often, you don’t want to discard the spells in your hand. However, there is a plethora of cards in this set with flashback, activated abilities from the graveyard, and recursion spells. Suddenly, discarding a card isn’t necessarily a cost at all.

Having a 2/3 for three that will block a two-drop, dig toward your pieces, fuel your graveyard synergies, and potentially contribute to multiple archetypes is a lot of contribution to your game plan for a common. The cards seem to reach across them in ways that should reward you for figuring out exactly how the pieces fit together. Be sure not to sift past this one too quickly.

Okay, now admittedly, the previous cards are cards I think will be good. This is a card I desperately want to be good.

Paradox Shaper presents such an appealing dream here, all on one card. Every turn, mill more and more of your deck, take advantage of all of your threshold cards and recursion, control the game, and eventually put your entire deck in your graveyard and use the two-mana ability to stack your deck with your best cards over and over.

Is this good? I don’t know, but I can promise you I will be doing it. It is exciting to have an uncommon that synergizes with the set mechanics while also promising a whole side quest of its own. Those are the cards that make me want to draft a format over and over again just to see whether I can make the stupid thing work.

I will be burning my gems forcing this later into the format, so good job siphoning my money, WOTC. Well done.

Oh my god, is that Call of the Herd’s music?!

This is a card that is just plain strong on its own. It’s two 4/4s with trample in one card that you can discard or mill for value, or just cast straight up. This is one of those cards that feels kind of whatever, but while a 4/4 trample for four is not really the best rate in modern-day Limited, being able to do it twice—and not always having to even draw it—is going to feel awesome.

The front half is already something you’re perfectly happy to cast, which means every time you loot it away, mill it over, or otherwise get it into the graveyard, you’re turning something that was already playable into future material. In a format that seems interested in giving you plenty of ways to fill your graveyard, that’s a pretty appealing deal.

I’d expect this card to be disrespected early but grow into a player as the set matures. I will say, though: keep an eye out for your opponent’s Unsummons…

This set feels similar in some ways to Final Fantasy. Lots of branching cross-synergies, build-arounds, space to explore, and excellent designs. Cards fit into multiple strategies, the graveyard gives otherwise ordinary effects additional utility, the fixing looks good enough to let you get ambitious, and Empower Jace introduces a persistent decision point that both players are going to have to navigate.

I think the gameplay will force you to engage creatively with the cards you combine to get an advantage over your opponent. It doesn’t feel like the majority of games are going to be pure aggressive curve-outs. Instead, it looks like the kind of format where you’re rewarded for figuring out interactions, finding unexpected homes for cards, and squeezing a little more value out of everything you’re doing.

There’s a sense of care and love you can feel in these designs. Some real thought went into this, which is refreshing when I haven’t felt that a whole lot this year.

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Maybe two weeks from now I’ll be complaining about this format with everyone else. But for the first time in a while, I’m looking at what WOTC is slopping into the trough and genuinely excited to dig in.

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