Creating a Reality Chip Commander Deck in MTG: A How-To Guide

Key Cards

The Reality Chip

The Reality Chip is crucial for maximizing your spell casting. You always want to keep it attached to a creature since it doesn’t function on its own, allowing you to view the top of your library instead.

Due to its low mana cost, you can bring The Reality Chip into play early in the game. Although reconfiguring it costs a bit more, it’s still manageable in the initial stages. It’s best to wait to play it until you have several creature options available for reconfiguration.

Unwinding Clock

Unwinding Clock is one of the top artifacts in this deck. It untaps all your artifacts during each player’s untap step, allowing you to consistently reuse your most effective tapped abilities.

As the majority of your creatures are artifacts, you can attack with them freely and still have blockers since they’ll untap. Additionally, Unwinding Clock will let you refresh your mana sources, ensuring you have mana available for counterspells during opponent turns.

Steel Overseer

Steel Overseer is the card that enhances your weaker artifacts into formidable threats. By tapping this card, you can place a +1/+1 counter on each artifact creature you control. Many of your artifact creatures start as 1/1s, so stacking counters will provide you with powerful attackers and blockers.

Steel Overseer works exceptionally well with Unwinding Clock since you can use its ability multiple times during a single turn cycle, applying several +1/+1 counters to your creatures before your next turn begins.

Urza, Lord High Artificer

Urza, Lord High Artificer is recognized as one of the most remarkable blue creatures printed and is particularly strong when included in a Reality Chip deck. It allows all your artifacts to tap for blue mana, effectively addressing the struggles of ramp in blue.

Using Urza’s ability lets you pay five mana to cast the top card of your library for free after shuffling it. Although the card is exiled, you can cast it at any point during the turn. You’ll also generate many artifact tokens, making the Construct Urza creates quite substantial.

How To Play The Deck

A deck built around The Reality Chip focuses on utilizing a plethora of artifacts and leveraging the various artifact support cards available. Despite the limitations of being a mono-color deck, blue is a dominant color for artifacts, enabling the inclusion of some of the best artifact-focused options in the game.

There are numerous ways to reduce the costs of artifact spells; cards like Etherium Sculptor, Foundry Inspector, Jhoira’s Familiar, and Cloud Key can help decrease artifact mana costs by one. Most cards in the deck either cost colorless mana or just require a single colored mana, maximizing these discounts.

Ramping can be challenging for blue decks, but there are strategies in place to overcome this issue. Karn, Legacy Reforged provides colorless mana for each artifact you control, usable only on artifacts. Silver Myr and Ornithopter of Paradise serve as traditional mana sources, tapping themselves to generate mana, while Urza, Lord High Artificer allows tapping artifacts for blue mana.

The primary strategy for winning with this deck centers on combat. You should strive to build an army of artifact creatures either by casting them or creating tokens. Alternatively, you can achieve victory via the Twenty-Toed Toad, which automatically wins the game if you either have twenty or more cards in your hand or it possesses twenty or more counters.

Another possible win condition is Mechanized Production, which leads to victory when you control eight or more artifacts with the same name during your upkeep, including tokens, making it a reachable win condition.

The deck’s main drawback lies in its slower pace. Once you accumulate sufficient mana, you can accelerate gameplay by casting spells from the top of your library after reconfiguring The Reality Chip. However, early game options can be limited.

You might be able to deploy some smaller creatures (including your commander) early on, but it will take time before you start seeing real benefits. There is plenty of card draw available in the deck to help expedite your journey toward your victory conditions.