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Counters have been a part of Magic: the Gathering since its first release, Alpha. Different cards use them to track stat changes, abilities, a card’s state, triggers, and more. Counters are a vital part of creating simple card effects, but some cards care about the counters themselves. This leads to exciting and powerful synergies, which is one of the many reasons why Counters Matter decks are so popular. Today, we’ll talk about what makes Counters decks special and you’ll get some tips and ideas to help you build your own Counters Matter deck.
What are Counters?
If you’ve played Magic for a while, the answer will seem obvious, but it’s good to appreciate what counters do for the game before building a Counters Matter deck. A counter is a marker on a card or a player that changes its characteristics or tracks something. Lore counters on Sagas track the current chapter, +1/+1 counters boost a creature’s stats; counters are used in many different ways on different cards.
This tool lets Magic designers build simple and fun synergies, whether in a Draft environment or a Commander precon. Cards can interact with counters with keywords like Proliferate or with unique abilities that add or remove them from cards and players. Whether they interact with counters as a whole or a specific kind of counter, cards like these form the synergy core of any Counters Matter deck.
Every single expansion since Tempest has included a card that uses +1/+1 counters, a testament to the mechanic’s reliability. Aside from the actual cards and players, the most certain thing you’ll find at any Magic table is a pile of dice for tracking counters. Needless to say, you’ll have plenty of options for your Counters Matter deck.
Each section below is focused on building an archetype for a certain bracket. All of these ideas can be played in any bracket, as they all have a variety of options at different budgets and power levels. This article focuses each section mostly on one bracket for simplicity’s sake.
+1/+1 Counters: Simple and Strong (Bracket 2)
A +1/+1 counter gives a creature +1/+1. It’s the simplest kind of counter, and the most abundant. Over 2000 cards reference it, so you can make this theme work in pretty much every color identity. We recommend having the color white in your deck’s identity, though, because many of the most consistent enablers can be found in mono-white.
Mikaeus, the Lunarch is one of my favorite commanders for when I want to focus on +1/+1 counters. It comes in for X and one white mana with X +1/+1 counters and he can tap to either put a counter on himself or remove a counter to put one on all of your other creatures. At its worst, it buffs your board every other turn, but with a little bit of support, you can do way more.
Before we make the most of Mikaeus’ ability, we need creatures to buff. You want most of your cards to either make tokens or be creatures. With more creatures, Mikaeus will add more total power to your board on each activation. Make sure to have some non-creature token generation though, so you don’t fold to a boardwipe. Cards like Skrelv's Hive and Felidar Retreat can make your deck much more resilient.
With that taken care of, it’s time to start multiplying our counter generation, Mikaeus will be able to give your board counters every turn if you can put a counter on him every turn. Luminarch Aspirant, Bulwark Ox, and Siege Veteran can accomplish this with minimal additional support. Even better are cards that Proliferate like Grateful Apparition and Metastatic Evangel. These cards give your entire board extra counters in addition to your commander.
Traditional lists like these don’t go much higher than Bracket 2 without an array of expensive staples and Game Changers. Without a strong low-cost draw suite, these decks will run out of gas quickly. I don’t have a problem with that. My Mikaeus deck is one of my go-to Bracket 2 lists. The deck makes a big board presence relatively quickly while playing fair Magic, and at Bracket 2, it’s exactly where I want it to be.
Commander
Planeswalkers (1)
Creatures (38)
Artifacts (7)
Enchantments (9)
Lands (40)
100 Cards
$101.54
The Icon Herself… (Bracket 3)
We have to mention the queen of counters and consistent top 3 commander herself,
Proliferate can work especially well with cards/card types that use counters to track uses or abilities. Sagas are particularly nasty with Atraxa. Sagas activate their chapter abilities when you add lore counters. You get through their abilities twice as fast with Atraxa out, which is especially powerful alongside sagas that flip into creatures like Tribute to Horobi or The Restoration of Eiganjo.
Experience counters can also work well with Atraxa. Many creatures in her color identity have abilities that both give and benefit from experience counters. Some of these creatures, like Minthara, Merciless Soul or Katara, Waterbending Master, can get out of control super fast alongside Atraxa’s proliferate. You can also bring in artifacts like Insight Engine or Magistrate's Scepter that use charge counters for game-changing abilities.
It’s also good to look for the little synergies. Astral Cornucopia and Everflowing Chalice are middling mana rocks in most decks, but because they generate mana for each charge counter, Atraxa will ramp them up over time. Planeswalkers in general are above rate here; your commander is a big flying blocker that gives each of them an extra loyalty counter every turn. On top of that, many of the best staples like Badgermole Cub and The Great Henge get just a bit better with proliferate.
I personally don’t like to win with infect, but I’ll talk about it here because it’s her usual win condition. Poison counters debuted in the 90s, but in the Scars of Mirrodin block, they finally made a competitive impact with the Infect mechanic. Creatures with infect give players poison counters instead of dealing damage, and if you get ten poison counters, you lose. Poison counters are extremely hard to remove, so if you can put one or two on each of your opponents, they will eventually succumb as Atraxa proliferates the counters. It’s slow and inevitable, and if that sounds appealing to you, go ahead and build into it.
My favorite win cons here are cards like Ouroboroid, Cosmogrand Zenith, and United Front. The latter two can both create tokens and +1/+1 counters, preparing your board for a big push, and the former douses your board in ludicrious amounts of +1/+1 counters. All three can quickly generate a big board presence, and are wonderful options for higher-budget +1/+1 counter decks.
Part of what makes Atraxa so ubiquitous is that she can command a deck built around most counter types. Experience counters, Sagas, Planeswalkers, charge counters, and Infect can all be cohesive themes that benefit from Atraxa’s proliferate. Some unique counters don’t have a dedicated commander, and sometimes Atraxa provides more value than an archetype’s dedicated commander.
Below is a standard Atraxa deck, but I recommend you explore your own deck ideas when it comes to building her.
Commander
Planeswalkers (7)
Creatures (24)
Instants (4)
Sorceries (6)
Artifacts (11)
Enchantments (10)
Lands (37)
99 Cards
$1188.03
Counter Combo
Counters can have cool synergies, but sometimes, you don’t even need to care about the type of counter you have. Take Tayam, Luminous Enigma, a 4 mana Abzan commander with two abilities. As a static ability, it gives your creatures a vigilance counter when they enter. More importantly and more impressively, for three mana, it can remove three counters from creatures you control to mill 3 cards and put a nonland permanent with MV 3 or less onto the field from your graveyard.
If you have a way to make infinite mana and infinite counters, Tayam can put your deck into your graveyard and immediately get a combo win. How convenient it is, then, that Tayam can enable many of its own combos. The simplest is the Devoted Druid combo. If you have a way to boost the druid’s toughness by 2 without using +1/+1 counters, you’ll be able to use her abilities three times to put three -1/-1 counters on her while adding three green mana, and then use Tayam’s ability to spend that mana and remove those counters. Centaur Garden is a great piece to enable this: Tayam can recur it and it’s a land that can be fetched out with a Crop Rotation or the like. You can loop this combo to use Tayam’s ability as many times as you need.
Of course, this isn’t the only way to win the game. Basking Broodscale and Rosie Cotton of South Lane make infinite Eldrazi Scion tokens that you can sacrifice for unlimited colorless mana. Ashnod's Altar can be used with a variety of other pieces to get infinite mana and counters alongside Tayam. That leaves one real question: How do we get to the point where we can perform the combo?
Some cards just happen to make a lot of useless counters. Icatian Moneychanger from Fallen Empires is a one mana creature that enters with three counters and gets another one every turn. Winding Constrictor and
With those counters and the dense ramp package, you’ll be able to activate Tayam’s ability and start going through your deck until you find one or more combo win conditions. Even if you ‘whiff,’ you’ll probably have a land to recur, so each activation will bring you closer to winning the game.
This deck will feature green quite heavily, with creature tutors like Nature's Rhythm and mana dorks like Birds of Paradise or Delighted Halfling. It’s a Bracket 4 combo deck by all metrics. You’ll want a high budget if you want regular access to all of your colors, for those fetchlands and shocks, and your tutors will also cost a pretty penny.
Lower budgets can still have fun with this commander, though. The saga creatures from Final Fantasy work great with this commander, as Tayam can remove their lore counters to keep them around and constantly retrigger their abilities. Below, you’ll find a combo list featuring all of the above, but I encourage you to brew around at a lower power level.
Commander
Planeswalkers (1)
Creatures (37)
Instants (8)
Sorceries (6)
Artifacts (9)
Enchantments (8)
Lands (31)
100 Cards
$1202.69
Closing
That’s all for today. Counters are awesome, and hopefully you’ve gained a few tips on how to build commander decks around them. They can be fun, powerful, or both, depending on your playstyle and budget.
