There’s been an adage floating around the internet for many years that people experience a ‘musical paralysis’ at around age 30, where they no longer widen their interests, and stick to the genres & tracks they know. I’ve only turned 25 this past weekend, but to some extent I find Magic players likewise hit a plateau of exploration in deck building—finding a color or theme they enjoy, and dispersing it among all their Commander lists. Today I’ve decided to make a concerted effort to, in a form of self-parody, lean into the cards and ideas that I’ve grown attached to in my half-decade of playing Magic; this is certainly still an article I’m taking seriously, but in choosing my Commander for the focus today, Fain, the Broker, I’ve boiled down everything I appreciate about a card in the Command Zone into this magical options trader. Join me in this exercise, and think about distilling your own preferences for Commander, as we drink our own Kool-Aid and tinker with Fain.
“Remove a Counter from a Creature You Control”
At his core, Fain is a Strixhaven-themed riff on Trading Post, representing a host of different inputs & outputs, with the added ability to pay extra for another go at the ATM. There’s a whopping four activated abilities on this card, all of which have the opportunity to filter resources between one another, but the most unique choice is his second: Removing a counter, for a Treasure token. This is a fairly rare effect in Magic, being printed usually as a 1-off per year of Premier sets as a hoser for whatever counter-based silliness may emerge; cards like Hex Parasite & Thrull Parasite come to mind, dealing with the Proliferate synergies of New Phyrexia and Simic Guild of Gatecrash. Fain in contrast urges us to remove counters from our own Creatures, and there’s been a profound increase in juicy options for that, as the Wizards design team has attempted to crack down on repeatability.
Undying & Persist are two sides of the same coin, returning a dying Creature to the battlefield with either a +1/+1 or -1/-1 counter, respectively, if they died without that relevant marker. If we remove those counters, of course, it ‘resets’ this effect, allowing us to kill them again & again. Moreover, with Persist in mind specifically, each type of stat modification counter cancels each other out, and with Fain actually placing +1/+1s with his first ability, we can kill a Persist creature, and place counters on another, allowing it to in turn be reborn once more. Lesser Masticore & Persistent Constrictor are stand-outs, but Puppeteer Clique is the best of them, bringing another juicy body to do with what we will. There’s a number of potential win conditions stemming from interactions like these, but we’ve largely avoided them, given so many are 2-card combos, such as the infamous ‘Mike & Trike’, of Mikaeus, the Unhallowed and Triskelion. I’m covering these cards, both Undying & Persist, in spite of their relative absence from this list, because they’re undoubtedly the first thing someone thinks of when ‘removing counters’ is mentioned. Modern Kitchen Finks combos make that clear enough. Instead, starting this list at Bracket 2, I wanted to plumb the depths of more niche counters, and there’s no better place than a far more recent design safety valve: Finality Counters.
Destination: Finality
Introduced rather recently with The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, Finality Counters were Wizards’ answer to repeated play patterns, allowing for powerful recursion without the threat of that same reanimated Creature coming back over & over. This had been tried before, with Corpse Counters (as seen on From the Catacombs), but the difference there is that Finality has an inherent effect, that causes the replacement exile. That means that removing the Finality Counter also removes the exile clause, whereas the same is not so for Corpse Counters. Cards like Emperor of Bones represent an impressive potential reanimation, but in theory you can never access the same Creature twice…yet Fain turns this downside into mana, and we’re off to the races. As an example, the newly-revealed Chaos Shrine’s Black Crystal might seem a bit high-risk, but the reward is juicy, helping us recur threats one at a time, and sacrificing it with Fain if the crystal becomes a liability.
Osteomancer Adept & Scavenger’s Talent, both from Bloomburrow, comprise a mini Forage engine, helping us see more cards and get back critical pieces, of both low & high mana value respectively. Tarrian’s Journal//The Tomb of Aclazotz is in much the same vein, and while it is risky to dump our hand, this faith in the board state is rewarded with a phenomenal land that helps us dodge Commander Tax over and over. This is even more true with one of perhaps the single-best cards in Fain, Meathook Massacre II. Often this just gets played on curve if we have the mana for it, and unless an opponent has exiling removal (and we lack a sacrifice outlet), Fain and the rest can come back over and over, peeling off their Finality Counters each time. There’s also the opportunity to tax our opponent’s life when their Creatures die, but frankly that’s just gravy, outside of flexing it as a means to end the game through combat.
This manipulation of Finality Counters speaks to the bending of design context, covered on last week’s Commander Focus, resulting in some of the most fun, unintended things you can do in Magic. If you squint, Doomed Necromancer & Soulcoil Viper are basically the same card. This also points towards another major component of the deck, in that it is firmly in the realm of ‘reanimator’ as a theme. If we’re cheating in Creatures not intended to stick around and be repeatable, we had better be reviving the gaudiest, silliest synergistic pieces available to us. An easy way to pump this list to Bracket 3 is to add better means of binning these targets, such as Entomb, but here we’re hoping to mill or discard them along the way. There’s of course cards like Thief of Blood & Cemetery Desecrator, which help with the counter removal game plan, but the heftiest portion of our reanimation suite is dedicated to a curious type of Creature, first introduced in Final Fantasy: Saga Creatures.
One Saga After Another
Sagas enter with a Lore Counter, and get another after your Draw Step, but critically the Chapter abilities that trigger based on the number of counters check prior to resolution. This means that, in the case of our Saga Creatures, so long as we keep them from an open game state following the resolution of their final Chapter ability, not only do they remain on the Battlefield, but those effects proc every single turn. Want to make opponents keep sacrificing their Creatures while keeping Summon: Anima on the board? Fain’s abilities being Instant-speed allow you to put that ability on the stack, remove a counter, and keep Anima on top of that juicy capstone. The same is true of Summon: Bahamut, Summon: Primal Odin, and even Jecht, Reluctant Guardian//Braska’s Final Aeon (our honorary Saga Creature).
The same is of course true for non-Creature Sagas, here The Cruelty of Gix & Urza’s Saga, but as Fain cannot himself remove their counters, we’re far less invested in them compared to those from Final Fantasy. Still, we’d be fools to turn our noses up at repeatable tutors, especially in Bracket 2, which is why the third of our extremely limited pool is Ayara’s Oathsworn. While not a Saga per-say, Oathsworn functions much the same, looking to hit 4 +1/+1 counters, tutor a card, and then in theory never tutor again. But, not only can Fain accelerate her rise to 4 counters—he also resets her for the next swing. This repeatability, need I remind you, is resulting in at least an extra Treasure per turn, and because this mode of Fain functionally only costs {3}, as the Treasure pays for the {B} to untap, it’s exceptionally accessible.
Close En-Counters
Fain is far from the only means we have of selectively removing counters, and beyond complete removal by way of the aforementioned Thief of Blood or Aether Snap, we’ll largely be peeling them off one by one. Unfortunately, the amount of different parameters for counter removal varies wildly from card-to-card, and it’s perhaps the most annoying point of contention when piloting this list. The good news? Every single means of doing so can target Creatures. Yet Thrull Parasite cannot target lands, and Fain himself, only Creatures. For universal options though, there’s great picks like Render Inert which is card-neutral, or Power Conduit, which is close to a mini-Fain, insofar as it can reset two Persist Creatures at once. While low on the curve, Etched Slith & Ferropede are both extremely fragile, and require getting in for combat, but the flexibility offered by them being Artifact Creatures lets Fain make use of them, should an opponent produce blockers at an inopportune time. On the topic of combat, this deck actually has more reason to participate in that phase than just Slith & Ferropede, as another permanent type exists to incentivize both the removal of counters, and getting in.
The Twilight Battle(s)
The debut of Planeswalkers versus Battles is one of the funniest mishaps in recent Magic memory (not counting the foibles that make me feel existential dread). Each was previewed with a card in the block previous, in Tarmogoyf & Atraxa, Grand Unifier, and their debut was met with reasonable praise & excitement for further exploration. Planeswalkers kept trucking, 1-2 per set from essentially then on, but Battles…uh, where’d they go? We haven’t seen a single new Battle since March of the Machine, and while their difficulty in design stems from being both Double-Faced Cards and horizontal orientation, it seems a bit weird to introduce a new card type and leave it to rot. No matter, I bet we’ll see more in 2026, but until then, we’re jamming the playable ones in Fain’s cabinet of curiosities.
The thing about Battles is that while the current Sieges select an opponent to defend them, you still control the permanent itself, not unlike a Curse. This means we’re able to very readily rid these multiplanar struggles of their loathsome Defense Counters, and get them Defeated in order to access the back side. I want to stress, our choices here are not necessarily the best-in-slot, but they represent a potential new evolution for Fain once more Battles come out. At a minimum, Invasion of Fiora//Marchesa, Resolute Monarch is staying in the list no matter what, as not only is it a phenomenal board wipe, but Marchesa herself is yet another repeatable means of stripping counters from permanents. Our other Battles are only okay, but with the game plan we have it’s still a cool enough set of inclusions to warrant consideration, especially at Bracket 2. On a semi-related note, I would highly encourage the printing of more Impending Creatures, like Overlord of the Balemurk, because good lord we’re often just strictly casting it for 2 mana most of the time. If you thought that card was good before, just wait until you see it here.
Coin-Operated Boy
While Fain can certainly generate a win with repeated uses of final Chapters, an overly complex set of combo wins simply had to be mentioned, else it wouldn’t be a Commander Focus. Combining Puppeteer Clique, Ashnod’s Altar, and Thornbite Staff is a known endgame, but we can do better. Did you know Devoted Druid was part of a cycle? Yes, by combining Fain with Cinderhaze Wretch, via Marvin, Murderous Mimic, Agatha’s Soul Cauldron, or even Necrotic Ooze, we can strip hands and push towards a win. This goes to show that, applied correctly, that entire cycle is just genuinely broken as a mechanical conceit. Not just that, but with Cryptic Trilobite we can siphon off Colorless mana, and turn it into more usable Black with Initiates of the Ebon Hand or Bog Initiate, and with Fain’s two +1/+1 counters we generate a total of {4} off of Trilobite to use. Each of the Initiates also help to make up for the fact that we’re on a greedy manabase, so even without a combo at hand, they can make your Meathook Massacre II’s {B}{B}{B}{B} far more palatable.
The point here is that funny interactions that perform infinite or nearly-so loops are rampant in this deck, but only for those with the eyes to see them. It is deliberately non-obvious in its approach to a wincon, not unlike old-school Ghave, Guru of Spores, where sufficient synergy density probably popped off. This is also true of our land package, which includes not only the obvious Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth+Cabal Coffers for mana generation, but also Dark Depths+Thespian’s Stage, a package familiar to Legacy players in the audience. While the most straightforward means of making a Marit Lage token are to Depths using an on-board land, this is actually a deck with ample ability to clear the counters off of the original land, something largely unheard of outside of exactly Vampire Hexmage. Yes, a great many cards provide us with ways of fully clearing counters from problematic permanents, and while for many that’s the end goal of their effect (Aether Snap, for example), there are also pieces like Mutated Cultist which help us to cheat out our big reanimation targets on top of ridding cards like Dark Depths of their burdensome counters.
Example Decklist: Fain-t Attack
Along the lines of Mutated Cultist comes a small mana acceleration package, with Dark Ritual & Culling the Weak each largely being used to spit out an early Fain, or one of our Saga Creatures well above schedule. I wouldn’t deliberately call this deck an aristocrats strategy, but we can produce enough Inkling tokens for Culling and similar to be useful, as well as the ever-appreciated Skullclamp. In fact, for Urza’s Saga specifically we can fetch not merely mana or land tutors along the lines of Expedition Map, but also that busted Equipment, and even Hex Parasite as a way to kickstart our game plan. If not limited to a mere three tutors, you’d be seeing Tezzeret, Cruel Captain make another appearance here, even as I attempt to kick the habit of his rampant inclusion. One card that did just barely make it in, however, is Corrupted Zendikon—we can turn Dark Depths into a Creature to peel off counters more freely, and even get it back once it inevitably awakens into Marit Lage. Bet you didn’t know Black had a means of animating lands, even if it’s rather lukewarm out of a very specific context.
Decklists are kept updated, and may change with set releases.
The mana base is intricately-crafted to be as much a workhorse as our nonland cards. We’ve included every competent means of discarding cards via lands, in order to help bin our reanimation targets, with options like Fomori Vault & Spymaster’s Vault each helping filter through pieces to find what we need. Nesting Grounds is an absolute killer with Finality Counters, taking them from our cards, and putting them on opposing permanents, being an odd sort of incidental grave hate I’ve never played with prior. As for more deliberate grave hate, I’d call Abstergo Entertainment slept-on if it were from a better set, but frankly Assassin’s Creed ended up so woefully forgettable that even the best cards from that set got memory holed. That being said, it’s basically an off-Buried Ruin if you don’t need the rest of the yard, and here we’re making ample use of its ability to get Sagas on top of just Legends & Artifacts. There’s fewer relevant pieces of Historic support in Black than I thought going into this, but it stands out as one with minimal opportunity cost. If you really wanted to crank up the power, why not consider Glacial Chasm, especially alongside Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth? Both Urborg & Yavimaya are technically Colorless, but let lands which normally don’t tap for mana still do their thing. Removing the counters accrued from Cumulative Upkeep and keeping ourselves alive should be evidently silly, as well.
It Insists Upon Itself
I borrow an oft-referenced line from Family Guy of all places to describe my view on this list, “It insists upon itself.” This was posed as an aimless, faux-cinephilic critique of The Godfather, but here I have some love for its intent; it is a statement on media that is so boldly itself, eagerly showcasing what it wants to be, that it breaches into the overwrought. That’s where I sit, firmly in that far-flung corner of complexity, ranting excitedly about enchanting a Dark Depths with Corrupted Zendikon, for a Commander with fewer than 500 decks on EDHREC. That’s why I get excited to feverishly cover these odd explorations of the format’s depths.
The choice of Fain compared to another, more popular take on this theme such as Tayam, Luminous Enigma is similarly purposeful. There’s no doubt in my mind that, purely on the basis of having additional access to both White & Green, that Tayam is the better card. Pulling back the layers, though, Fain’s upfront cost is far less (being only 3 mana, with no cost to activate) and with the flexibility of his other modes, you can weave in additional synergies. Tayam is a better card, but Fain isn’t strictly worse, despite having a mere 5% the decks Tayam does on EDHREC. I’ve said this before, but you’ll always be best served in finding a Commander with novel text, even if it doesn’t seem especially good at face-value; even with a single color, the pool of cards is plenty deep, if you know the right terms to search and synergies to call upon.
These micro-interactions and Fain’s propensity for translating one resource into another is at the core of what I love to do in Magic; I always aim to construct decks with their best possible outcomes at heart…before inevitably reining myself in a bit to make sure the list actually functions. There’s a balance there, of breaking design context and ‘using a fork as a spoon’. Chasing that experience is available in Magic to a degree unlike any other game system, and for someone to learn syntax in order to plumb a search engine like Scryfall is an achievement in of itself. To that end, it’s less important that this list is good (which indeed, it is, and has performed admirably in testing even against slower Bracket 3 pods), but instead that it is proudly contrived in its execution. Taking my design ethos of jamming as many activated abilities as is feasible to its natural extreme has been a tremendous time, and I strongly urge you to do the same with your next Commander—if not a success, it will at least let you evaluate from where you ‘find the fun’ in this wonderful game.
Until next time, Fain ignorance.
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