In 2022, The Reality Chip officially became the Magic: The Gathering card with the longest type line - and it will likely remain that way for a looooong time.
The type line is one of those oft-heard parts of a Magic: The Gathering card that never really gets a lot of focus. Located just below the artwork, it's the part of the card that literally says exactly what kind of a card it is, followed by the card's expansion symbol.
Because space is at a premium in that part of the card, Wizards of the Coast often keeps things pretty simple with types as short as simply "Instant" or "Sorcery." On creatures, keeping it simple means something like "Creature -- Human Soldier."
Other times, though, it can get a bit wordier.
Never had it been any wordier than in 2022's Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. That set introduced a card called The Reality Chip and with it came a crazy-long card type. In fact, it's the longest ever in the game.
It's a "Legendary Artifact Creature — Equipment Jellyfish" and, as you can see, it barely fits on the type line and comes in at a squished smaller font. Surely the folks at WotC had to break a few rules to do that.
And, well, they actually did, as the powers that be at WotC came down hard on it for doing so.
How do we know?
Because Mark Rosewater said so.
"Legendary Artifact Creature — Equipment Jellyfish ...the most unique type line ever printed to date is in this set, and it's awesome. I can't wait to see how you guys top it in the future!," said Rosewater in a Tumblr post last year. "We had to break some rules to print that card type line, and learned we can’t break them again, so don’t expect anything quite that long in the future."
He also added that "Sometimes we do something we know we’re supposed to not do, but we do it anyway, and then it causes problems downstream which is why the rule existed in the first place."
So what does this mean? Well, Magic had rules in place for the type line because of an earlier, unsaid incident in which rules were put in. But then Neon Dynasty came out with a card that had a lot of long words, 49 characters in total, that broke that. At 49 characters, it became the card with the longest type line in Magic history. And, due to the fallout of it being so long, it will most likely remain so as the rules came crashing down on it hard after that.
We'll likely not see one as long as that ever again, all thanks to some designers trying to fudge the type line, and it not really working out.