If you’ve ever lost a game to a pile of dice and a sentence that starts with “you get a counter,” you’re not alone. MTG counters explained is really just learning which counters matter, which ones are a temporary inconvenience, and which ones are a win condition wearing a fake mustache.
Counters show up everywhere in Magic: power boosts, “frozen” permanents, slow-burn value engines, and the occasional “surprise, you’re dead at ten.” Let’s sort the chaos into something you can actually play with.
What counts as a counter (and what doesn’t)
A counter is a marker placed on an object or player that changes something about the game. It’s not a token, not a card, and not some mysterious third thing you can bounce with Unsummon. It’s just a marker that rules and card text care about.
Here are the common “not counters” people confuse with counters:
- Designations: the monarch, the initiative, “the Ring tempts you,” city’s blessing. These are real game objects/labels, but not counters.
- Emblems: planeswalker emblems live in their own rules space. They also are not counters.
- Tokens: a Treasure token is a permanent. A +1/+1 counter is not. Yes, it matters.
One very practical rule: counters on permanents usually don’t survive a zone change. If your creature dies, gets blinked, bounced, or exiled and returns, it’s a new object and those counters are gone (unless something explicitly moves or replaces them). Counters on players don’t have that problem, because you are unfortunately not a creature and cannot be blinked for value. Yet.
MTG counters explained for players: poison, experience, energy, rad
Player counters are where “win conditions” and “resource systems” live. These are the ones that sneak past normal “combat math” and make people read your board like it’s a tax form.
Poison counters (the actual alternate win condition)
Poison is the famous one: 10 poison counters and a player loses the game. Not “takes 10 poison damage.” Not “goes to 0 life.” Just loses.
How you usually get poison counters:
- Infect: damage to players becomes poison counters, and damage to creatures becomes -1/-1 counters.
- Toxic: combat damage still hurts life totals, and also gives poison counters equal to the creature’s toxic value.
In Commander, this doesn’t magically scale with 40 life. It’s still 10. That’s why poison decks feel “unfair” to people who only prepared emotionally for normal damage. (Yes, some groups house-rule 15. No, the rules do not care about your group chat.)
In Two-Headed Giant, poison is team-based and the threshold changes. If you play that format, do not “helpfully” correct someone to 10 and then act confused when the rules correct you back.
Experience counters (value that sticks to you, not your board)
Experience counters don’t make you win by themselves. They’re more like a personal scoreboard that certain cards check to scale their effects. You get experience counters from specific card abilities, and then other abilities say things like “do X where X is the number of experience counters you have.”
Two key takeaways:
- They’re on you, so they stick around even if the creature that gave them dies.
- They stack with proliferate, because proliferate can hit players.
Experience counters are why some Commander decks feel like they’re “inevitable.” You can remove the engine creature, but you can’t remove the accumulated “oops, i did it again” counters unless a card specifically removes counters from players.
Energy counters (resource, not a win condition)
Energy is basically “mana, but only for cards that say energy.” It’s a player counter system you can build around, mostly from Kaladesh-era cards and a few newer revisits.
Energy is not inherently lethal, but it can turn into lethal damage, infinite turns, or a board state that makes your opponents stare into the middle distance.
Rad counters (Fallout’s polite little murder timer)
Rad counters are player counters with an inherent triggered ability baked into the rules. At the beginning of your precombat main phase, rad counters make you mill that many cards, then you lose life and remove rad counters based on what you milled. It’s self-cleaning… in the same way a paper shredder is self-cleaning.
Rad counters are a great example of “this counter isn’t the win condition, it’s just how the win condition arrives.”
Stun counters and other “no, you don’t get to untap” tech
Stun counters live on permanents, and they work like a stackable freeze effect.
If a permanent with a stun counter would untap, it doesn’t untap. Instead, you remove a stun counter. One counter buys one failed untap attempt. Multiple stun counters buy multiple turns (or multiple untap attempts) of misery.
A few common gotchas:
- Stun counters don’t care why you’re untapping. Untap step, spell, ability, paying an untap cost. The counter still gets “spent” instead of untapping.
- Removing the last stun counter does not untap the permanent. It just sets up the next untap attempt to work normally.
- If you’re counting on “when this becomes untapped” triggers, stun counters can quietly shut off your plan because the untap never actually happens.
Stun is usually a tempo mechanic, not a win condition. But tempo is how plenty of Limited games end. You don’t need to “win the game” if your opponent never gets to play it.
Counter-based win conditions you’ll actually run into
Poison is the headline, but Magic has a deep bench of “win the game if this has enough counters” cards. These are the ones that turn a normal board into a ticking clock.
A few patterns you’ll see a lot:
“Put counters on this, win at a number”
These cards usually say “At the beginning of your upkeep/end step, if this has N counters, you win.” The counter type might be unique to the card (tower, filibuster, growth, etc.), but the gameplay is the same: protect the permanent, grow the counter count, force answers.
“Remove counters to release the monster”
Classic example: permanents that enter with a pile of counters and do something huge when the last one leaves. The counters are the safety latch. Once it’s gone, the game gets loud.
“Counters as inevitability”
Sagas (lore counters), level up (level counters), and slow engines (time counters, charge counters) often don’t say “win the game,” but they create a board state where your opponent is functionally out of time. That’s still a win condition, just with more steps and fewer fireworks.
Counter math that wins games: proliferate, doubling, and “nope” cards
This is the part where MTG counters explained becomes “MTG counter arithmetic explained,” and everyone discovers they are bad at math while under social pressure. Same.
Proliferate: the great counter multiplier
Proliferate lets you choose any number of permanents and players with counters and give them another of each kind they already have. That means proliferate can:
- grow +1/+1 armies
- tick up planeswalkers
- add poison counters (yes, really)
- add experience counters
- add rad counters
- add stun counters to keep something locked down longer
If you’re playing against proliferate, you need to treat “one poison counter” as “this might become three when i blink.”
Doubling effects: read the target carefully
Some counter-doublers only affect permanents you control, which means they don’t help with poison or experience counters at all. Other doublers explicitly work on players too, which absolutely does.
This is one of those rules moments where the exact words matter more than your vibes.
The hard stop: “players can’t get counters”
Cards that prevent counters from being placed can turn off entire strategies. Poison decks hate them. Experience decks hate them. Planeswalker decks also hate them, but they’ll pretend they’re fine because they’re used to suffering.
Draft and table logistics: tracking counters without losing your mind
In Draft and Sealed, counters show up constantly, and you don’t get bonus points for “remembering it mentally.” You get bonus points for being correct.
A few practical habits:
- Use distinct dice for different counter types (even if it means you own enough dice to qualify as a small business).
- Put player counters (poison, energy, experience, rad) in one consistent spot near your library or life pad so they don’t drift into your battlefield.
- If a counter is rules-dense (stun, rad), say it out loud once when it matters. Not because your opponent is dumb. Because Magic is loud and everyone is tired.
If you’re playtesting with printed cards, it can help to print small reminder cards or trackers for your weird counters so the table stays clean. ProxyFoundry’s guide on How to Make MTG Proxies: Printing Guide and Legality Basics covers practical playtest setups, and A Simple MTG Proxy Labeling Standard for Casual Play helps keep “alternate win condition” decks from turning into a surprise ethics symposium mid-game.
MTG counters explained, in the end, is simple: know which counters change combat, which counters change the rules, and which counters end the game while you’re still doing normal math like a chump.