Pattern Recognition #135 - Counters

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

2 January 2020

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Hello everyone! Welcome back to Pattern Recognition! This is TappedOut.net's longest running article series. In it, I aim to bring to you each week a new article about some piece of Magic, be it a card, a mechanic, a deck, or something more fundamental or abstract. I am something of an Old Fogey and part-time Smart Ass, so I sometimes talk out my ass. Feel free to dissent or just plain old correct me! I also have a Patreon if you feel like helping out.

Hey everyone! Welcome to 2020! Today's subject isn't what you might think given the title, so let me tell you a little bit of history of Magic's design.

Counters are a non-permanent marker placed on a permanent or player that represents a modifiable condition for the target of the counters. Counters can be added, removed or moves from one target to another. According to Mark Rosewater, counters were created by Richard Garfield, Ph.D. during the design of Alpha in order to measure changes in a creature's power and toughness as well as to mark resources in a more abstract manner.

Cards like Fungusaur, Living Artifact, and the perfection that was the Sengir Vampire all started out in Limited Edition Alpha, and for a moment, all was good.

For you see, Counters were self-contained. In that either their purpose was clear, such as with the ever-popular counters that changed power and/or toughness, or were a resource marker used by the card that made them to denote how many times they could use that resource.

Then Wizards decided to get ... creative.

Now, normally this wouldn't be a bad thing in of itself, but rather what we started to see was a frankly stupid proliferation (no, not Proliferate, though that does work on Counters) of counter types.

You see, over the course of the game, we have had... oh man, I can't believe I'm about to do this... Age, Aim, Arrow, Arrowhead, Awakening, Blaze, Blood, Bounty, Bribery, Brick, Carrion, Charge, Coin, CRANK!, Credit, Corpse, Crystal, Cube, Currency, Death, Delay, Depletion, Despair, Devotion, Divinity, Doom, Dream, Echo, Egg, Elixir, Energy, Eon, Experience, Eyeball, Eyestalk, Fade, Fate, Feather, Filibuster, Flying, Flood, Fungus, Fuse, Gem, Glyph, Gold, Growth, Hatchling, Healing, Hit, Hoofprint, Hour, Hourglass, Hunger, Ice, Incubation, Infection, Intervention, Isolation, Javelin, Ki, Knowledge, Level, Lore, Loyalty, Luck, Magnet, Manabond, Manifestation, Mannequin, Mask, Matrix, Mine, Mining, Mire, Music, Muster, Net, Omen, Ore, Page, Pain, Paralyzation, Petal, Petrification, Phylactery, Pin, Plague, Poison, Polyp, Pressure, Prey, Pupa, Quest, Rust, Scream, Shell, Shield, Silver, Shred, Sleep, Sleight, Slime, Slumber, Soot, Spark, Spore, Storage, Strife, Study, Theft, Tide, Time, Tower, Training, Trap, Treasure, Velocity, Verse, Vitality, Volatile, Wage, Winch, Wind and Wish.

All those are counter types. That's 125 of them. So far! And there will be more to come, I just know it!

Now, why is this? I mean, I barely recognize half of those, and how many of those just appear on one or two cards? Just look at some of those names! I mean Hoofprint? Where does that one come from?

Hoofprints of the Stag?

Wha...??????

OK, so this leads into my first serious issue with Counters. In the beginning, cards that used counters tended to just use generic counters on them. Such as with Fasting. These cards didn't need individual names for their counters because counters could only go onto and count for the card they were on. So adding random names to them? Why?

Well, it's because of the source of so many problems in Magic... It's because of . Because someone got it into their bright heads that you should be able to move counters around to various permanents. So if you had counters on one card, and moved them onto another, are they the same type of counter now? No! That's because everyone got their types of counters given errata so that this sort of confusion couldn't happen.

Way to ruin it for everyone, .

But thankfully, Wizards has seen fit to at least try to mitigate the damage being done. We're down to a far more reasonable number of re-used counter types.

Of course, not all Counters are made equal. While Age and Time counters are used explicitly as countdown markers for cards with Fading/Vanishing/Cumulative Upkeep or Suspend respectively, and things like Gold are used as an active resource, what is the value in something like Energy?

Because, oh yeah, in case you forgot, counters can go onto players. Like Poison. Which I won't get started on.

Now, Energy as a resource is something I would like to have a look at in more detail at some point in the future, as well as making sure I examine the pitfalls that came with it, but that is something for a later day.

But I bet you're actually here for the big subject now, aren't you?

Well, before I get to it, I jut wanted to remind everyone that before Wizards finally realized how stupid they were, they created cards that could hand out +0/+1, or +1/+0 or +2/+0 or +2/+1 or +2/+2 or -0/-1, or -1/-0 or -2/-0 or -2/-1 or -2/-2 counters.

I wish I was joking.

Thankfully, all of these have since been dropped from the game, and you are unlikely to see any of them outside of searching Gatherer or a weird Vintage/Legacy/Commander game. Or Baron Sengir.

Yes, I'm hyped for a new Baron in Commander Legends. So what?

Regardless, you won't see any of those anymore. All you'll see are +1/+1 and, more rarely, -1/-1 counters. These two simple counters form the backbone of a lot of creature work, and can be found in practically any set so long as there is not a specific theme for counters being included in that same set.

And of those two, +1/+1 counters are the single most prolific counter in the game. If you looked at a random game and saw, say a die on a creature, that would most likely be representing the number of +1/+1 counters on it. Not to say that this is true all the time, as me recently deceased Thelon of Havenwood deck ran all sorts of counters in it. It got taken apart to fuel my Syr Konrad, the Grim deck.

Anyway, +1/+1 counters are so common that I really have no place to even start talking about them. Every colour, even colourless, gets them in practically every set. They exist as part of one of Wizard's design synergies - that of positive interactions. Because bigger creatures are better, and putting counters on a creature is a permanent reminder of that embiggening.

-1/-1 counters have a bit more history to them. They first appeared in Arabian Nights of all places, on one of my favourite under-appreciated cards, Unstable Mutation. These appeared intermittently until Lorwyn-Shadowmoor, where these sorts of counters became more omni-present, displacing the usual +1/+1's. Here, they acted partly as a way to work with the Wither mechanic, where a creature could deal damage to another creature in the form of -1/-1 counters, and as a resource where creatures could add or remove a -1/-1 counter that they entered the battlefield with on them in order to perform an action. Like Deity of Scars or Dusk Urchins.

After that, -1/-1 counters lay fallow for a long while, occasionally showing up. But they made their big return on Amonkhet, where the creatures could use them in much the same way as they did in the previous examples, but with more possibility of them dying because of it, all the better to fit the theme of the plane.

But for now, we're back to just the occasional mention of them, with the focus on the more positive interactions.

Of course, when you get a creature with both +1/+1 and -1/-1 counters on them they cancel each other out on a one-to-one basis until only one type of counter remains. I have no idea when this rule was introduced - though I think it was Lorwyn.

Because before that rule was introduced, you could have both counters on the same creature, which just led to recordkeeping headaches, and honestly this is one of those rules changes that I can get behind 100%.

Moving on, there are also loyalty counters on Planeswalkers, but who uses those anyway? ;) They are unique in as much as they are tied to a certain card type, and no other. They also can be removed by ever-helpful creatures and are perfectly balanced in usage!

I'm not going to talk about Proliferate here. It is something that still had a nasty lingering effect on the psyche thanks to New Phyrexia. But I can say that Proliferate can only work because of the sheer proliferation of counters over the years.

And I'm not sorry about that pun at all. I'm proud of it.

But there are a couple of things I want to point out about counters in general. And that is, they can go onto a card that doesn't use or recognize them at all. For example, Llanowar Reborn is a land that enters with a +1/+1 counter on it, and the keyword Graft which allows you to move that counter onto a creature when it enters the Battlefield. As a land, it has no inherent use in such a counter - unless it becomes a creature (and let's face it, that's pretty easy nowadays). But it has one anyway.

Another thing I like to do with my Arena Brawl deck starring Gideon Blackblade is to hold off on playing Idyllic Grange until Gideon is on the field. When the land enters the battlefield, it is ususally untapped thanks to me being mono-, and I can put the +1/+1 counter on Gideon as he's a creature, and that will stay on him when it isn't my turn. I love this game sometimes!

There's a lot that can be said for Counters. They exist in many forms, but in the end, they all come down to two things. Either they affect a creature's power and/or toughness, or they are a measure of a resource.

I mean, I haven't even touched on Charge counters yet, and all the hilarity involved with those!

Sorry for the shortness, but it's still the holidays when I'm writing this. But regardless, join me next week when I talk about counters! I mean, there's so much to talk about! Right?

So, until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job, but more income is always better. I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!