by Elton Gahr

Created on: November 07, 2009

One of the more interesting cycles of cards in the future sight expansion set of magic the gathering was a group of suspend cards which were able to re suspend themselves rather than going to the graveyard after being cast. What this effectively meant was that once you had cast the card it was going to simply keep coming back every few turns and there was not all that much that the opponent could do about it. The only real weakness is that they were generally not the fastest of spells.

Reality Strobe is an uncommon sorcery from the future sight expansion set of magic the gathering. It cost two blue and four colorless mana to cast, but no one has ever cast this in tournament or casual play, instead it costs one blue and two colorless to suspend with three counters on it. When it does come into play after being suspended it allows you to return any permanent to its owners hand and then more importantly is removed from the game with three time counters on it again to return again when those counters are removed.

This becomes a considerable annoyance to many decks, though it is slow enough that in a truly competitive tournament setting it is a little difficult to count on. On the other hand if you are playing a deck with a number of counter spells and the designs to make a game go a long time, perhaps with the strategy of decking an opponent this is a card that will slow them down as much as almost any card in the game.

To truly make this useful though the goal has to be to have it go off more often. There are a couple ways to do this. The first, though not technically changing it is to have more than one copy in play, and in a deck where you have this it is reasonably likely to happen since it helps slow down the game.

The other way is with rift elemental or other cards that remove time counters. Rift elemental is a 1/1 red creature that can remove time counters for one red and one colorless and gets +2/+0 in the process. If it can also bounce the creature that was going to block it with reality strobe this becomes an even more powerful creature which can either do a considerable amount of damage or simply speed up your suspended cards.

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