Magic the Gathering – Final Fantasy releases on June 13th. Along with the main set, there are also four brand new Commander precons filled to the brim with awesome cards. In this article, I’m going to review the Counter Blitz deck and discuss the best ways to upgrade it.

As you can guess from the name, the Counter Blitz deck is all about putting counters on your creatures. The deck is adept at moving counters around, multiplying them, and taking advantage of them more broadly.

THE COMMANDERS

As usual, the deck features two really great options to serve as the general of the deck. Tidus is the face Commander, and he comes with the ability to move a counter at the beginning of combat. This ability is pretty good in it’s own right, as moving a counter to a creature that is best at using it can allow your turns to go much more smoothly. 

But that’s double true with Tidus, because when one or more of your creatures with a counter on them does combat damage to the opponent, you draw a card and proliferate. In other words, Tidus can really allow you to turn one counter into a whole bunch of value, and it’s the type of value that can seriously snowball. Drawing extra cards means you’ll find more counters, and proliferate will make all of your permanents with counters way better.

The deck’s other option is Yuna, Grand Summoner. She gives you mana that makes your creatures enter with two counters, and if you have a creature with counters die, she lets you convert them to +1/+1 counters and put them on another creature.

While both of these legendary creatures are great, I think Tidus is the better option. The proliferate + draw combination is incredibly powerful, but he doesn’t just win out in terms of sheer power. He’s also more flexible. While both Yuna and Tidus have abilities that can be good with any type of counter, Tidus’s proliferate at counter-moving effects only require you to have a permanent in play with counters. 

Meanwhile, Yuna needs a permanent to go to the graveyard for her “any kind of counter” effect to become relevant. Yuna is great in the 99, that’s for sure – but Tidus is the better Commander.

NEW CARD HIGHLIGHTS

In addition to the two new legendary creatures, this Commander precon also contains a whopping 24 brand new cards. I’m going to highlight the cards that I think work the best with Tidus, and/or the cards that I think are the most likely to impact the Commander format more broadly.

This deck features several of the new “Summon:” sagas. These are all simultaneously creatures and Sagas. Like al Sagas, they get sacrificed after the last chapter resolves, but Tidus can make them much more powerful. His ability to move counters means you can take lore counters off of them. This can allow you to get the same trigger over, and over again, while also not having to deal with the Saga’s expiration date.

Summon: Yojimbo and Summon: Ixion are probably the nastiest to keep around, as both of them have a Chapter I that lets you exile something, and if you’re doing that every single turn, your opponents are going to be in trouble.

On the flip side, you can also use Proliferate to get multiple chapters in the same turn, which can also be quite powerful.

Speaking of Proliferate, Tidus isn’t the only card in the set that can go wild with that mechanic. Tromell, Seymour’s Butler can proliferate for only a single mana, and he does it once for each non-token creature that entered under your control in a turn. Even proliferating once for one mana is pretty good, and because this deck is so adept at drawing cards, proliferating more than once is also on the table. Tromell would be great if he only had that activated ability, but he also makes your nontoken creatures enter with an extra counter. This allows him to be a one-man engine.

This deck also features tons of creatures who love it when counters are put on them – with Lord Jyscal Guado Guado and standing out the most. They both have powerful end step triggers that go off if you put a counter on them in a turn. Jyscal gives you a clue, and Wakka puts a +1/+1 counter on every creature you control. They are both great places to put counters too because of their evasion, and Wakka can even smash some artifacts, which is almost always worth doing.

Sin, Unending Cataclysm and Rikku, Resourceful Guardian gives the deck two more very powerful counter payoffs. Sin can remove all counters from most permanents, convert them all to +1/+1 counters and double them. The most interesting thing about that “enters” ability is the fact that it doesn’t restrict you only to your own counters. This means you can disrupt your opponent in a big way while playing a huge Leviathan.

Rikku also comes with an activated ability that lets you “Steal” opposing counters, and her ability to make a creature that gains a counter unblockable for a turn works very nicely alongside Tidus’s proliferate trigger.

Lastly, let’s talk about what might just be the strongest card in this deck because of its combo potential – Gatta and Luzzu. While they have a very meager body, the enters trigger can be quite powerful. On a basic level, you can flash in Gatta and Luzzu and block something big while targeting itself, and you suddenly have a huge creature. But there are also some instant-win combos that they enable.

In fact, they included one such combo in the deck, because it comes with reprints of Walking Ballista and Hardened Scales.  They are two of the best +1/+1 counters ever printed, so it’s great they included them in the first place, but are insane alongside Gatta and Luzzu.

If you control them alongside Hardened Scales and Walking Ballista, you can play Gatta and Luzzu and target the Ballista. Then, the Ballista can ping itself as many times you want, gaining a counter every time it does. Once you have enough, you can machine gun all of your opponents to death with all of those counters.

Basically, if you combine Gatta and Luzzu with any counter multiplying effect (Vorinclex and Doubling Season work too, for example) and any creature who can remove counters for free to do damage (Triskelion works too), you can get a combo win out of nowhere, and at Instant speed.

It’s not often that you see such a combo in a Commander precon, but this is one you should definitely keep in mind.

$50 UPGRADES

While the precon is definitely quite powerful right out of the box, there are some changes you can make to the deck to make it even stronger. They involve going even harder on counter synergy.

Mana’s really great in Commander, isn’t it? Both Kami of Whispered Hopes and Rishkar can turn all those counters into lots of mana. The Kami needs the counters on itself to produce mana, but it also powers up all of your other +1/+1 counter-adding effects.

Meanwhile, Rishkar brings a few counters along for the party, and lets every creature you control with a counter on it tap for mana. Both the Kami and Rishkar can allow you to make super powerful plays way ahead of schedule in a +1/+1 counter deck.

New Capenna’s Brokers are super into counters, and they also happen to be Bant. There are a couple of great cards that slot perfectly into this deck. Their leader, Falco Spara gives you a shield counter, and then lets you cast creatures from the top of your library by using counters.

Brokers Confluence is a great modal spell. Sometimes, if your whole board is built out with lots of counters, you can Proliferate three times to just win the game. But the two other modes are often useful too. You can using the phasing to protect Tidus and other important cards, and there are tons of activated abilities that are worth countering.

Brokers Confluence is a great way to proliferate, but so are Evolution Sage and Karn’s Bastion, because it’s very easy to proliferate repeatedly. Evolution Sage doesn’t even ask for extra maan to do it – just land drops, which are going to happen naturally. Karn’s Bastion is a little costly to do the job, but the fact it’s a land that can produce mana in the early game helps make up for that, especially because it can become a real engine late.

Gavony Township is also an excellent utility land for the deck. It doesn’t proliferate, it does put counters everywhere, and there are no shortage of ways to take advantage of those in this deck.  

I removed the following cards to make room for these changes:

Pull From Tomorrow
Path of Discovery
Sunscorch Regent
Grateful Apparition
Duskshell Crawler
1 Island
1 Plains

You can find the updated decklist here. 

ADDING GAME CHANGERS

The Bracket System was introduced earlier this year. It’s a way of judging the power of Commander decks. A big part of this system is the use of a list of “Game Changer” cards which only more competitive decks in brackets 3 and above can play.

If you’re playing in one of those higher brackets, there are 3 Game Changers that I recommend prioritizing for this deck. 

The One Ring is a powerful artifact that can draw you an insane number of cards. It also happens to make use of counters. So, Tidus’s ability to Proliferate can allow you to draw even more cards with it. And if you’re really in a pinch from losing life to The One Ring, he can even move burden counters off of it. Although, most of the time The One Ring’s ability to draw cards will let you win before you ever need to worry about it killing you.

Creature tutors are good in all Commander decks, but they are especially good in this one. This is partly because the deck comes with the aforementioned ready-built combo involving two creatures, but this deck has a high creature count in general. 

Turning your entire deck into a toolbox where you can grab the right tool for the job is very powerful, and Worldly Tutor and Survival of the Fittest let you do that. And in this deck, you can even grab Sagas, expanding the kinds of tools that you have access to. Grabbing Summon: Yojimbo or Summon: Ixion when you need the removal that they offer is really strong. Especially if Tidus is in play and can give you their Chapter I over and over again.

FURTHER UPGRADES

The good news about counter-themed decks is that there are tons of powerful cards that are excellent for you.  The bad news is, some of them are on the pricier side. But on the plus side, these cards are useful with lots of different Commanders, so it’s an investment worth making.

Vorinclex and Doubling Season both double your counters, and Vorinclex also nerfs your opponents counter effects and gives you a huge body. Doubling Season is also really good in token decks, and this deck does make a few of them to take advantage of that part of the card too.

Innkeeper’s Talent is a great source of +1/+1 counters, and as you level it up it gives you even better effects. Granting your counter creatures ward 1 makes them much harder to kill, and level 3 gives you yet another effect that doubles your counters.

While The Great Henge isn’t a counter payoff per se, it is just a very strong card that virtually any Green deck should run. It’s not going to be that hard to cast, and once it’s on the battlefield it becomes a source of incredible value. It ramps your mana, gains you life, draws you cards – and, importantly for this deck – gives you +1/+1 counters.

I’m a big fan of the Swords of X and X cycle. They all offer a reasonable buff, powerful protection, and great combat damage triggers. Sword of Truth and Justice works particularly well here because it gives you +1/+1 counters and Proliferates.

Lastly, there’s Bristly Bill, who spits out counters like crazy with it’s landfall ability. And while it can’t double all of your counters, the fact you can sink mana into it to double the counters on one of your creatures is bound to be a powerful effect on most board states.

END STEP

So, that’s my take on the Counter Blitz Commander deck. What do you think? Does Yuna actually make the better Commander? Am I leaving out a card that you think really takes this deck to the next level? Let me know over on X or Bluesky.