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The Reality Chip is a unique commander available inMagic: The Gathering. It is mono-blue, so you’re only able to play blue and colorless spells in your deck. Originally released in Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty, The Reality Chip is an unorthodox commander that lets you play cards from the top of your library so long as it’s attached to a creature.
The Reality Chip focuses on artifacts, as there are a ton of cards in blue that discount the cost of artifacts making it easier to play them off the top of your library. The Realty Chip is an artifact itself, letting it take advantage of the artifact support in the deck.
Chief of the Foundry
x21 Island
Scene of the Crime
Seat of the Synod
The Mycosynth Gardens
War Room
The decklistconsists of 35 creatures, two sorceries, eight instants, 13 artifacts, seven enchantments,and34 lands. Nearly every creature in the deck is an artifact creature, or a creature that has an effect relating to artifacts.
Key Cards
The Reality Chip
The commander for the deck, The Reality Chipis an important key in making sureyou cast as many spells as possible. Youalways want The Reality Chipreconfigured onto a creature,as it does nothing on its own but lets you look at the top of your library otherwise.
If The Reality Chip is reconfigured onto a creature and that creature gets removed or a board wipe occurs, the Reality Chip will go back to being a creature.
Thanks to its low casting cost, you’re able to get The Reality Chip on the battlefield very early. Reconfiguring costs a bit more, but still small enough to be easy to do during the early stages of the game. You do need a creature to reconfigure to, though, and it’sbest to wait to cast until you have multiple options of creatures to equip.
Unwinding Clock
Unwinding Clockis one of the best artifacts in the entire deck.Ituntaps all artifacts during everyone’s untap, letting you constantly re-use your best effects that require artifacts to be tapped.
Since most of your creatures are artifact creatures,you’re able to attack with them freely and still have blockers since they’ll untap. Unwinding Clock also lets you untap your mana rocks so you canhave mana for counterspellswhen your opponents' turns are happening.
Steel Overseer
Steel Overseeris the card that turns all your weak artifacts into massive threats. By tapping it,you put a +1/+1 counter on all artifact creatures you control. Most of your artifact creatures start as 1/1s, so stacking them up with counters will turn them into powerful attackers and blockers.
Steel Overseer pairs especially well withUnwinding Clock,since you’re able to use its effect four times in a full turn cycle, giving four +1/+1 counters to all your creatures by the time your next turn starts.
Urza, Lord High Artificer
Urza, Lord High Artificeris one of the best blue creatures ever printed, and it’s especially strong in a Reality Chip deck.It turnsall your artifacts into mana dorks that can tap for a blue mana. Since blue struggles with ramp, this is especially useful in ensuring you can always cast spells off the top of your library.
If you have a land you can’t play on the top of your library, you can use Urza’s ability. This will shuffle your library and exile the top card, potentially putting a card you can play on the top.
Urza lets youpay five to cast the top card of your library for freeafter shuffling it. The card is exiled, but you can cast it at any point during the turn you use Urza’s effect. You’ll have a ton of artifacts, so the Construct Urza creates will wind up with high stats too.
How To Play The Deck
A Reality Chip Commander deck isplaying a ton of artifacts and taking advantage of the plethora of artifact support cards. While being a mono-color deck can be a downside (especially for a commander with a grounded effect like The Reality Chip is), blue is one of the primary colors for artifacts, allowing you to play many of the best artifact-focused cards in the game.
There are multiple ways to discount artifact spells, including Etherium Sculptor, Foundry Inspector, Jhoira’s Familiar, and Cloud Key, all of which make artifacts one less mana to cast. Most of the cards in the deck are either colorless, or only have one colored mana requirement to fully take advantage of these discounts.
If you have multiple permanents that discount artifacts, the effects will stack. So if you have three of them, your artifact spells will be discounted by three mana instead of just one.
Ramping can be a struggle for blue, but there area few ways to counteract thatin the deck. Karn, Legacy Reforged adds a colorless mana for each artifact you control, but can only be used on artifacts. Silver Myr and Ornithopter of Paradise are more traditional mana dorks, tapping themselves to add mana, and Urza, Lord High Artificer can tap artifacts for blue mana.
Theprimary win condition of the deck is winning through combat. You want to amass an army of artifact creatures, done throughcasting them or creating tokens.Alternatively, you can win withTwenty-Toed Toadwhich automatically wins the game if you have twenty or more cards in your hand or it has twenty or more counters on it.
There is also Mechanized Production, which wins the game when you control eight or more artifacts with the same name at your upkeep. This includes tokens, making Mechanized Production an easy win condition to achieve.
Thebiggest flaw of the deck is its slowness. Once you have enough mana, you can quickly start snowballing by casting spells off the top of your library once you reconfigure The Reality Chip. However,thereisn’t a lot the deck can do in the early game.
You can get a few small creatures out quickly (including your commander), but it’ll take a while before you start seeing the payoffs for them. There’s a lot of draw power in the deck, so you can get to your win conditions a lot quicker to help mitigate this downside.
