MTG Salvation

Counterspells don't see a lot of play at my table. Since degenerate combos are fairly uncommon for us it's hard to come out ahead in the value game by playing counters. But I really enjoy the creative challenge of building a competitive deck under extreme constraints and for a while I've wanted to put together a deck that goes really deep on counter magic. Something like a deck with 18+ counter cards (be they instants or permanents) within a budget of $50-60 (so no Mana Drains or anything). How would you build a deck like that?

Here's a couple of seed ideas:

• Guile seems like a worthy curve-topper that can generate a lot of value from each counter.
• Wizards, as a tribe, have a lot of members who can counter spells as an activated ability such as Ertai, Wizard Adept, Voidmage Prodigy, Disciple of the Ring and Patron Wizard

The mages are good. If you really want to counter a lot of spells there is no way around permanents that counter multiples, like Dovescape, Planar Chaos Ice Cave, Counterbalance and Erayo, Soratami Ascendant. If you do a lot of 1-for-1 you are engaging in kingmaking.

Desertion helps.
And maybe others.

You'll probably want to run mass bounce effects.

(and you might lose friends...)

If you don't really care about the 'Draw Go' play style of traditional blue control decks, you could go with wizard tribal like this.


None of the expensive stuff is really essential other than patron wizard. the patron + prophet of kruphix allows you to keep up with any number of players.

A friend of mine uses Lullmage Mentor in a Merfolk tribal deck with Cursecatcher. I think that might not be what you're after though.

I used to run a deck based around countering stuff to troll a certain friend, who had a preference for infinite combo decks. (not anymore LOL)
My group is mainly large FFA's, so a deck full of 16 Cancel's is never going to fly.
I based it around bouncing creatures c/o Coastal Breach, Whelming Wave & Crystal Shard, and using the obvious Counterspell, Mystic Snake & Draining Whelk with help from Stunt Double and a heap of draw.
It worked okay without being great, it really needed cards that would just flicker the perms for it to work more efficiently, but I never went there with that deck.

For me, it really does depend on how many opponents you expect to play against. The bigger the table, the more you need mass-bounce.

Baral, Chief of Compliance for card selection. Talrand, Sky Summoner to create a win-con on the fly (literally, har har).

If you want to take it down a different route, I had a truly nasty Lurking Predators / Counterspells-on-legs deck knocking around in my meta a while back...
You play Simic Ramp and get Lurking Predators out as quickly as possible. From there, your opponent burps? Excellent, Predators triggers... oh look! Mystic Snake / Draining Whelk / Clone of an existing Snake/Whelk! Very, very hard to stop once it got rolling.

Thanks for all the suggestions. It sounds like wizards--or at least a wizard sub-theme--would be a good way to go. I'd hold off on that for now to see if they end up as one of the tribes being printed in this year's commander decks, but I'll give it some thought.

I also like the idea of a less-gimmicky, more creature-based route with Mystic Snake, Draining Whelk and Clones. It seems like you could slot those into your standard Simic bounce/blink shell with Deadeye Navigator and creatures like Coiling Oracle to give you an early game--plus Prophet of Kruphix to amp up the competitiveness.

You've given me plenty to consider.