Magic: The Gathering Vintage: Avatar of Burgeoning Echoes Appears in RUG Decks
Magic: The Gathering's Reality Fracture card Avatar of Burgeoning Echoes is reportedly seeing Vintage play, mostly in RUG Tempo/Control. A look at one week of MTGO Vintage Challenge results follows.
Avatar of Burgeoning Echoes, from the Magic: The Gathering set Reality Fracture, is reportedly being played in Vintage. Per the community column behind this report, RUG Tempo/Control builds have been the main home for it. BUG and Lurrus DRS variants have shown up as well.
The column's author notes that the results for these decks cover only a few weeks since Reality Fracture's release.
How the Avatar works
The Avatar builds on Empower Jace, a mechanic from Reality Fracture. If you Empower Jace X and you control no token Jace Planeswalker, you create one and put X loyalty counters on it. If you already control the token, the X counters go onto it instead.
That token Jace has two relevant abilities: -1 for Surveil 1 and -3 for Draw a card.
The Avatar links Empower Jace to a landfall trigger. A single land provides enough loyalty to surveil right away. A fetch land followed by another land provides enough to draw a card.
The Avatar also hands all of your Planeswalkers a -10 ability: put a +1/+1 counter on target creature for each land you control.
According to the author, running multiple Avatars makes the Jace token very difficult to kill.
The week in MTGO Vintage
The column covers three Vintage Challenge 32 events, on 10/15/2026 (40 players), 10/17/2026 (49 players) and 10/18/2026 (54 players). It also covers a Vintage Challenge 16 on 10/18/2026 (28 players). Together they produced about 170 decklist entries.
Jewel and Esper Lurrus were the most played decks of the week, with 26 copies each. Jewel held a 58.4% non-mirror win rate, while Esper Lurrus sat at 50%.
Initiative came third with 19 copies and a 43.1% non-mirror win rate. Dredge and Lurrus PO had 10 copies each, with non-mirror win rates of 45.8% and 61.1% respectively.
Vintage Challenge 32, 10/17/2026
The Top 8 was: 1st Jewel Shops (kungfugeek), 2nd Jewel Shops (Cachorrowo), 3rd Lurrus Breach (_SickDraw), 4th 4C Lurrus (albertosd87), 5th Lurrus Breach (s063), 6th Lurrus PO (Sommertroll), 7th Jewel Shops (Johnni) and 8th Oops! All Spells (ChessNight5030).
The second-place Jewel Shops list played Transmute Artifact and the restricted The Fantasticar, and left out Chaos Defiler.
Vintage Challenge 32, 10/18/2026
The Top 8 was: 1st Dimir Lurrus (Pietart), 2nd Initiative (espiatrianero), 3rd Esper Lurrus (DaveKaplan), 4th Countervine (COMBO-BOY), 5th Lurrus PO (Plagic86), 6th Jewel Shops (Enjoy_The_Silence), 7th Jewel Shops (Cachorrowo) and 8th Lurrus PO (BiggestBird).
What the results show
Jewel Shops and Lurrus variants led both Top 8 lists above, and none of the decks named there is an Avatar deck. The Avatar's reported presence in RUG, BUG and Lurrus DRS builds therefore comes without any placement in these Top 8s.
The column adds that players are reportedly practicing for Eternal Weekend, which takes place the week after the column's publication.
What is still unknown
The source gives no decklists or results for the RUG, BUG or Lurrus DRS Avatar decks. It does not say whether they will keep performing beyond the first few weeks. Eternal Weekend's dates and location are not given either.
What it means for players
- Vintage players can treat the Avatar as a landfall-based way to grow a Jace token that surveils and draws.
- By play counts and win rates, Jewel and Lurrus decks were the benchmark this week.
- Take the Avatar's early results with caution, since they cover only a few weeks.
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