Seeing What’s Up Next With The Reality Chip

Last week, I spent ten relevant words discussing The Reality Chip:

Michiko’s Reign Of Truth Is MTG’s Newest Cranial Plating

“I guess Future Sight is a Lurrus-compatible effect now.”

After some consideration, the card deserves a lot more discussion. It’s really easy to shortcut The Reality Chip as Future Sight, but somehow the card does way more than the raw best-case scenario of its text box.

I’m going to get the stupid part out of the way:

Legendary Artifact Creature – Equipment Jellyfish

It reads like a good joke, but also reads like a really good type line.

Kamigawa preview season is a great time for those of us who love unplayable Mox Amber decks

— Dom Harvey (@dominharvia) January 30, 2022

It’s that time again for someone to say Mox Amber and watch the card’s price ticker go up 40% again, but Mox Amber producing blue mana is actually the best the card can be.

In the interest of not throwing this entire article into the Mox Amber time hole, I’ll circle back to this later.

Dissecting The Various Shades Of Colossus Hammer In Modern

The obvious good place to play The Reality Chip also falls on the type line in exactly the place I said. It’s a Future Sight you can play with Lurrus of the Dream-Den, and it just happens there’s a prominent Lurrus deck in Modern with the ability to tutor for Equipment and a desire for cards that let it play long games. A single player (mariogomes97) has put up solid results with Azorius Hammer (Lurrus) recently without many others joining them in that niche, but the archetype is about to get a big boost.

The Reality Chip presents a chance for two cards that have fallen out of favor in stock Hammer to find their way back into the deck, even if they aren’t both in this specific list. Steelshaper’s Gift is the defining factor for the non-Lurrus lists, but the shorter-curve lists are already overloaded with ways to find Colossus Hammer. With a second value Equipment to find behind Cranial Plating, a bit of Steelshaper’s Gift for value starts becoming an attractive proposition again.

Giver of Runes plays the flip side of the game. The trick with The Reality Chip is it is a lot of mana to invest into equipping something onto a creature, even if the payoff is Future Sight. You want a bit of certainty that investment will pay off, and Giver of Runes is by far the best card for that job. The Burrenton Forge-Tenders in the non-Lurrus Azorius list are certainly nice, but protecting The Reality Chip as a creature from Force of Vigor is a way bigger deal.

The other draw to blue are the sideboard counterspells, and while the baseline of Mana Leak is the best broad-scope option, I’m really into the cheaper options. Spell Pierce versus Miscast is an interesting debate to have that probably goes in favor of Spell Pierce, since you want to aim it at Chalice of the Void or Engineered Explosives.

The other-other draw to blue is fetchlands over Silent Clearing.

Wait, wait, that sounds dumb without context. I think I skipped a step here.

A fetchland or any other shuffle effect is really good with The Reality Chip. If you can look at the top of your library at any time and you have free shuffle effects, you have built a free scry engine a la Mishra’s Bauble. Take a peek, then fetch it away if the card isn’t good.

If there’s one aspect of The Reality Chip that’s going to push it to deep playablity in older formats, it’s this. The floor of the card is in the ballpark of Wall of Omens, with an upside of just taking over the game with a barrage of extra cards. All you need to have are fetchlands, other creatures, and ability to play a longer, more attrition-based game.

Now back to the first card I mentioned. If only there was a deck that wanted to play a bunch of fetchlands, a bunch of creatures that need backup in a longer game, could unload a bunch of cards under Future Sight, wanted more blue legends for Mox Amber, maybe even was a bit of an artifact deck…

Just like with Azorius Hammer (Lurrus), a single Magic Online player (Jiggywiggy) has been the most prolific Underworld Breach pilot the last few months, but many other players have taken notice of the deck. The Reality Chip is basically custom-made for it, and even a couple of copies can make a big impact. You can Grinding Station yourself to flip to fresh cards once The Reality Chip is active. How cool is that?!

On a similar self-mill note, The Reality Chip pairs well with Thought Scour. This probably makes people think about Izzet Midrange, but I don’t think that’s right. Izzet Midrange already is winning when it has a creature on the battlefield; you don’t need cards that win more once that happens. It might sound weird to say Izzet Breach is different when it mostly plays the same creatures, but with the combo kill supplanting disruptive interaction, you’re much less likely to ride one of those the full way to lethal.

The Reality Chip does make an argument for moving back to the more combo-spell dense versions of Underworld Breach, where Manamorphose, Mishra’s Bauble, and Thought Scour play more of a role. That also promotes moving to a true Jeskai shell for Lurrus of the Dream-Den, dropping Emry, Lurker of the Loch… and leaning heavily on The Reality Chip to enable Mox Amber.

In Pioneer you won’t have fetchlands, but two out of three ain’t bad. I’m especially interested in The Reality Chip showing up as a buffer against aggression in Jeskai Ascendancy decks, where your other creature is the hexproof Sylvan Caryatid and a Future Sight effect should almost always lead to a combo kill in short order. It’s fighting for space in the card draw department with Treasure Cruise and Expressive Iteration, but it almost takes the spot of early removal as a blocker.

While Dom Harvey has made soloing people with Sylvan Caryatid the stock list of Four-Color Jeskai Ascendancy, a solid contingent of lists opt for partial redundancy in Paradise Druid. With The Reality Chip needing a safe place to sit while equipped, the extra hexproof creatures are an obvious inclusion. It would be really spicy to pair The Reality Chip with Omnath, Locus of Creation mana, but a lot of cascading changes to the list must happen to fit both of those cards into this deck.

Everything I Know About Four-Color Jeskai Ascendancy In Pioneer

I’ll leave Dom’s article here as a great reference for actually playing Four-Color Jeskai Ascendancy. Pioneer can certainly adapt to the deck and has since Dom won a Set Championship Qualifier with it last month, but it’s always a great option to have in the holster as one of the most powerful combo decks legal in Pioneer.

The other obvious place for The Reality Chip in Pioneer is Azorius Ensoul (Lurrus)… but I already talked about that last week and failed to include the card. Rather than salvage that mistake for basically no added value, let’s talk about trying to make that happen in a different format.

Today in the “what is legal in Historic” game, we have some tough contenders. Ensoul Artifact isn’t legal, but Nettlecyst is? What is even going on over there?

Can we build a functional Affinity deck in that format?

This is based off an existing list of Historic Affinity that leans on Reverse Engineer to keep a flow of action going, but after Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty you can just focus on taking over the game with proactive cards. Michiko’s Reign of Truth and The Reality Chip team up yet again for the right mix of killing your opponent, getting a billion free cards that end up killing your opponent, or my actual favorite of killing them twice as hard from the shame of dying to an attacking The Reality Chip boosted by a pump trigger.

I do wish Historic had another good zero-mana artifact to play for this deck, even ignoring how much better that makes Thought Monitor. Ornithoper is relatively dicey in this list, and Ingenious Smith really wants a free initial trigger to let you deploy it as an early, mana-efficient threat. You don’t even have Springleaf Drum to accelerate towards the Smith into a cheaper artifact turn, so honestly I’m wondering if the card is just a bit too slow for the format.

I’m less excited about the Future Sight aspect of The Reality Chip in smaller formats with more expensive cards, but it certainly will have more random bodies lying around to reconfigure onto. I don’t have definite places it belongs in Standard or Alchemy, but if The Reality Chip is going to show up in those formats, I would expect it to pair with Jaspera Sentinel, Prosperous Innkeeper, and Esika’s Chariot in Standard… or with Cleric of Life’s Bond and Inquisitor Captain in Alchemy. The latter is a bit less likely now that Glasspool Mimic doesn’t let you chain Captain triggers and the Clerics deck might just cut blue, but it feels like Righteous Valkyrie is the kind of card that really wants you to churn up some extra cardboard on a stalled battlefield.

Of course, that discounts every new artifact synergy you could build around once the full Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty set is previewed. As the format scales and you get more good, efficient cards to equip and cast off your deck, the power of The Reality Chip is only going to grow. The card already looks great today, and I expect it to look even better as time passes.