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Chisei, Heart of Oceans

Legendary Creature — Spirit

Flying
At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice Chisei unless you remove a counter from a permanent you control.

CMC
4
Mana cost
{2}{U}{U}
Color identity
U
Rarity
rare
Set
Betrayers of Kamigawa
Price
$1.54
EDHREC rank
#18171
Buy on TCGplayer
Chisei, Heart of Oceans card art
Chisei, Heart of Oceans lets you remove a counter from any permanent you control to keep every counter-bearing permanent on the board — including itself — at the cost of paying that toll every upkeep. The engine is genuinely powerful when you're drowning in counters, and cards like The Mirari Conjecture that naturally accumulate them make the tax trivial to pay. If you don't have a steady counter supply, Chisei becomes a 2/2 flier that eats your board.

Format Analysis

Where it lives, where it can’t

FormatVerdict
commander legal
legacy legal
modern legal
pioneer not legal
standard not legal
vintage legal
pauper not legal
oathbreaker legal

Commander is where Chisei, Heart of Oceans does its best work, slotting into superfriends, proliferate, and saga-heavy builds where counters are always in surplus. Legacy and Vintage are legal homes in theory, but the format speed leaves a three-mana do-nothing-until-upkeep legend without a natural home in any competitive shell. Oathbreaker is the other format worth noting — as the oathbreaker itself, Chisei demands a spell that generates or tutors counters reliably, which narrows the viable signature spell list considerably but rewards tight construction.

Key Combos

Combo lines featuring this card

Price Context

Current price

$1.54 cheap tier

At $1.54, Chisei, Heart of Oceans sits in the bulk-rare tier — easy to pick up and easy to justify as an experiment. Given its narrow build-around requirement, that price is fair and unlikely to spike without a major counter-synergy reprint or breakout combo discovery.

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Sources

Mentioned

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Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.