We’d like to think that the designers of our favorite card game know what they’re doing. Of course, they’re getting paid to put their heart & soul into every piece of cardboard, and ensure we’re getting the most fun out of these exciting, novel game pieces. Magic, however, is a game with more potential outcomes than atoms in the known universe, and for whom legal Commander decks are realistically uncountable. For this reason, sometimes interactions slip through the cracks; to err is human, and in a Legacy format, the card pool is so deep that only those with sufficient Scryfall-fu can deliver on the deepest cuts. I fully believe that Spider-Man Noir was created with the new Spacecraft from Edge of Eternities in mind, and with them you’re going to surveil plenty—far more than most +1/+1 counter-oriented Creatures. That being said, I’m here not to merely gesture at a reasonable amount of surveillance, with a reasonable amount of counters; we’re going to do our best to go beyond intended design context, and push this effect to its limits. Strap in, because it’s going to get janky.
The Real Cosmic Spider-Man
When it comes to the design of Spider-Man Noir, if you think the release of Spacecraft the set prior was a coincidence, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. While I doubt that we’ll see Noir in any premier format alongside Spacecraft, there’s no better way to accumulate counters on Creatures than with Station; this is something we’ve seen with a few other established ‘counters matter’ options, like the very handsome Falco Spara, Pactweaver, but the return on investment is far higher with Noir than most other Commanders. Once you’re attacking with something like a Wurmwall Sweeper, you’ve Surveilled 5, and that’s more cards seen each turn than cards like Sylvan Library or its contemporaries in Black like Cemetery Tampering. Critically, this is not card advantage, and is merely filtering you towards the best single card (if any) of the top however-many cards.
Once a Spacecraft is Stationed, however, that doesn’t relieve you of the ability to continue stacking Charge Counters, and crowding the crew’s quarters like a navy-run clown car. Each turn, while you are limited to a single attack, and single attacking Creature, you can pour more and more resources into one craft, meaning it doesn’t especially matter which one you’ve drawn. We’re on a total of five Spacecraft, all of which turn into Creatures, running every single option that becomes a body at 5 mana or below. That isn’t an especially high density for something we want early & often, but given the mechanic is in its infancy, we’re working with what we got. At the very least, Noir’s filtering and cards like Scrounge for Eternity can grab at least one by the midgame on average, and that’s all we need. Spacecraft might be the hot new thing for Noir, and even something within the design context of the card…but it’s far from the intended gameplan. Instead, we’re getting greedier, and springing for more counters than just those accrued from Stationing. What kind? Well…
“Surveil X, Where X Is the Number of Counters”
Counters in Magic have been around since the game’s earliest days, largely in the form of those which modify a Creature’s power & toughness. Due to the fact that these counters contributed to stats on the board, it meant that you had somewhat diminishing returns, as whether you were hitting in with a 16/16 Rock Hydra or a 60/60 Rock Hydra, either could be chump blocked, or would likely kill an opponent just the same if they connected. Where counters began to climb in their number was Mirrodin, via Charge Counters: A Chimeric Egg can be a 6/6 quite a lot of the time, and in something like a 4-player format, one can imagine the frequency of counters being placed if compared to a Rhystic Study. This is much the same with Station, where counters are semi-connected to power on board, with a ‘breakpoint’ when your investment in an abstract resource (charge counters) becomes usable stats. Still, until then, the point of Station or Charge Counters in general is nebulous. If counters no longer directly contributed to stats on the board, they could drastically increase in number, as you no longer needed to scale the game pace to the growing number linearly.
This is what is referred to as ‘design context’, the way that those behind the curtains are able to juice or dampen the potency of cards in relation to their strength with respect to other existing tools. That’s a bit of a mouthful, but it’s easy to explain if we look at a recent example, Ambling Stormshell. The number of viable Turtles in Magic is small, and the problematic repeatability of this card is similarly low (unless they suddenly release a Turtles-matter set in 2026). The degree to which this card could be ‘pushed’ in terms of its power is quite high, because its synergistic pieces are quite weak. The power of a card is only as high as it can be in its best possible context; this leads often to cards which seem absolutely busted, but because scaffolding doesn’t exist to exploit them, they fail. In much the same vein, Noir is allowed to track any counters because the expectation is that it likely caps out at around ~6, or in the case of spaceships, maybe up to 12ish. For permanents eventually intended to become Creatures, this is all well and good, but there’s a suite of options not likely to swing out which stack counters quite a bit higher.
That brings us to Helix Pinnacle, and its children, Vexing Puzzlebox & The Millennium Calendar. Each of these is several levels of abstraction away from +1/+1 counters, changing the number to win from a reduction of life from ~20 to 0, into attaining anywhere from 100 to 1,000 counters by performing game actions. While we can’t play Helix Pinnacle in Monoblack, the latter two are open to us, among other options. Now, in Edge of Eternities Commander they did print Moxite Refinery, which grounds both of the children in a capacity to turn their arbitrary counters into stats for the win (or otherwise achieve victory via Darksteel Reactor), but we can make this a lot easier. See, Magic has allowed players, largely in Blue, to animate their Artifacts like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. What happens when you’re being assailed by a living Calendar?
Night of the Living Doohickeys
The ability to turn non-Creature Artifacts into Creatures is, sadly, largely unavailable to Monoblack. The best ways to do so are indeed in Blue, or Blue-White, but we’re not entirely out of options. Toymaker & Karn, Silver Golem are both Colorless, and in Spider-Man, they even printed Living Brain, Mechanical Marvel which does much the same! Plumbing Black’s depths also reveals Xenic Poltergeist, back when Color Identity was more of a suggestion, and suddenly we’re reaching a density of cards where this might just function. The final nail in this slipshod house of cards is a pair of Planeswalkers we’d already be considering, being Karn, the Great Creator for whom we are deliberately not playing loops, and the gift which keeps on giving, Tezzeret, Cruel Captain. That’s…more than I expected, diving into this concept as a non-Blue list, and it’s far closer to the density you’d see in something like a Polymorph strategy, rather than a 2-card combo deck. We can work with this.
We’ve mentioned Calendar & Puzzlebox, but there’s actually two more options that are reasonable enough: Geometric Nexus & Eternity Vessel. Nexus is a bit of a meta call, as it compares about the same to something like a Chimeric Egg if you squint, but I tend to find anything that places multiple counters in each instance to be better here. In fact, we’re on essentially 0 means of Proliferation, because we’re not a ‘counters matter’ deck, we’re a deck where individual, single permanents’ counters matter. Vessel is critical because it not only allows our life to remain relatively high, but also in that it’s the most numerous source of counters without input, meaning we can chuck it out there freely once we combo off, and reap the rewards.
We aren’t just attacking with these big payoffs, as there’s more than one means of securing value from this many counters. Luxior, Giada’s Gift might be known for Devoted Druid combos, but here it not only turns our various knick-knacks into lethal threats, but also means of permanently securing counters via stationing Spaceships, once their power is raised. With enough mana, we can cascade these counters, crewing up one ship, then transferring Luxior, and crewing another. Both Flay Essence & Parting Thoughts are removal spells, yes, but we’re more keen to use them on our own animated Creatures, either gaining an absurd amount of life, or essentially fashioning a very weird Peer into the Abyss. If we’re milling a lot, but not the entire library, this is also where a card like Welcome the Dead comes in, creating a modest 20+ 2/2 Zombies, comparably tame when considering what we actually want to be doing here.
Caring for Your 5 Mana Commander
So the conceit of the strategy is now laid bare, and we’re doing something extremely silly you’ve probably not considered before, that’s all well and good. The issue arises that, in my investigation of this game plan, another entirely separate option for the Command Zone has been nagging me: Felisa, Fang of Silverquill. I do my best to justify specific options I write about, that I can firmly argue for their merit even with the downsides of being, for example, a 5 mana monocolor Commander with no protection. Felisa throws a wrench into that plan, because for one less mana, you get an additional color, and an ability that keys off of the very same gimmick we’re employing. That extra color is what really matters, as it critically gives us a better suite of Spacecraft to utilize, on top of counter synergy pieces like Resourceful Defense. Of course, the actual mechanism by which you ‘cash out’ is different; it still requires you animate a clock, puzzlebox, etc but now you exchange them for Inklings, after having grown fat with counters like a goose destined to be foie gras. From there, it’s as simple as a sac outlet to drain everyone out, or even just swinging with 70+ 2/1s with Flying. Ultimately, that is why I’ve settled at building Spider-Man Noir at Bracket 2, and if you intend to explore this concept at higher brackets, I do urge you to consider Felisa.
That being said, given she still has Black in her color identity, every lesson learned in this article still applies, so while we’ve got Noir on the brain, let’s talk about how we’re keeping him safe. Noir doesn’t require that he gets in, only that your destined Creature does, alone. This means we can essentially reserve casting him until we’re all set up, sitting in the Command Zone as a threat of activation rather than an on-board value piece. Cards like Imp’s Mischief can assist you in popping off, redirecting removal, and Silver Shroud Costume is both protection and a means of keeping your animate Artifacts around if the board is full of blockers. If Noir does get removed, however, it’s important we play means of resetting him like Command Beacon, as casting that card for 7 mana is entirely unappealing. Campfire has the added bonus of also shuffling our yard, which means we can survive if our attempt of entirely milling out with a ton of counters gets interrupted. Luxior, Calendar, and Campfire all sneak in as part of a category of card easier to repeatedly tutor for than ever, the coveted 1 mana Artifact. That’s four for four, in terms of decks I’ve worked on that include new Tezzeret since his release; funnier still, he’s appeared for different reasons each time, in different colors apiece. Here, we might try to turbo out his animation ultimate first and foremost, unless we’re lacking a counter battery like Calendar.
Surveillance State
So, hypothetically we’re in the midgame, maybe 80 or so cards left in our Library, and we swing out with a Calendar that’s 45 minutes to midnight, a cool ~250 counters. Our library is at our fingertips, a Doomsday pile of sorts the thickness of a Rubik’s cube—how do we win? The simplest way to start comes from having three Creatures on the board, letting us know we can take a Dread Return route. If we can’t, that’s what Cabal Therapy, Poxwalkers, and Bridge from Below are for, as classic tools of assembling bodies ala the infamous ‘Oops! All Spells’. There’s that bridge in Brooklyn I had to sell you on. From creating enough bodies to go off with Dread Return, the Creature we’re getting back is Eye of Duskmantle. When you’ve Surveilled the entire deck, having it available for functionally free sure is nice, but even if you’ve not got the life to spend on everything in your Graveyard, that’s why we have Flay Essence, which should do more than enough to offset what you’ll soon pay out.
The actual lethal push is easy enough, with Glaring Fleshraker and a Krark-Clan Ironworks loop available, by way of Myr Retriever & Scrap Trawler. You could also loop and win by way of Calendar, the far more stylish means, by repeatedly tapping and untapping it with KCI, and either Sonic Screwdriver or Clock of Omens. In terms of helping you get there, you of course have access to untappers including the likes of Unwinding Clock, which help you to increase the pace at which you rev up Puzzlebox & Calendar fourfold, and with enough mana you need only get halfway there, by using a Strionic Resonator or Peter Parker’s Camera on the initial Noir. One last path to victory comes in the form of leaving a card in the Library, here Exsanguinate, drawing it, and then casting an incredibly underrated card, Mutated Cultist. By removing ~40 counters from something, one might then cast an X-Spell like Exsang or Torment of Hailfire for {X}=enough.
Example Decklist: Can’t Stop the Clock
Beyond what’s been mentioned, there’s also a few cards that just play well fairly with Noir, namely Arcbound Crusher & Nine-Lives Familiar. If you’re just trying to get to the midgame, it is absolutely acceptable to be Surveilling ~8 your first go-round. Speaking of, a lot of our manabase is built for exactly that: Getting past the initial hill towards your core game plan. Tons of ways to provide our counter-rich yet brittle-boned Artifacts with evasion, such as Access Tunnel & Rogue’s Passage, which should signify to your opponents something fishy is going on. In spite of your Commander having an attack trigger, being so invested in keeping our attacker, singular, safe means we’re probably not aiming to present lethal through combat. When the deck works well, and goes uninterrupted or fails to have its pieces exiled early, you truly do get to perform some heinous cardboard alchemy.
Decklists are kept updated, and may change with set releases.
Cards not here that I feel are worth mentioning, though, are the final cuts of Traxos, Scourge of Kroog & Souls of the Lost. These guys are absolutely killer at Stationing up a Spacecraft like nobody’s business, and in a strategy with a higher density of those cards, they’d be right at home. This is a gesture back to Felisa, who I might just need to cover someday, because having nearly double the amount of Spacecraft to choose from would allow for the deck’s gimmick to be less all-in. There’s even a world where, if you’re in a more ‘battlecruiser’ meta, appropriate term given Spacecraft, opponents may feel better about themselves being killed by Inklings than a combo. If you don’t think the combo illustrated a few paragraphs ago would sit well with your playgroup, just bury the lede and kill them with ‘mathematically enough but not infinite’ 2/1 Flyers. I’m of the opinion that Noir & Felisa are both perfectly acceptable means to an end, when it comes to the deck concept this article is highlighting.
Sleepers One and All
Spider-Man as a set is likely a net negative on Magic overall, and I want to stress that this comes from a place of deep affection for the game. The amount of chatter I hear from scalpers about the set unknowingly slabbing awful cards, the outrageous prices for sealed product (and modest Prerelease attendances across the US), and crucially, the overall set’s power level. While this isn’t a strong set, not a sin itself, it appears to be largely parasitic in its synergies. Fewer are they, the cards like Spider-Man Noir which awaken or invite an exploration of the game’s mechanical history; a lot of it is just Spiders. Not even especially good Spiders, frankly.
That being said, I’d be lying if I said there’s not been a nagging sensation in the back of my head, that this might sit alongside Aetherdrift as a trove of undiscovered sleeper hits. In my Arachne review, I covered the incredibly favorable interaction between Convoke & Web-Slinging, and the fact nearly all colors received a slew of means to reset Enters abilities suggests there’s likely underused combos waiting to be broken out from the woodwork. In Noir’s case, this is the second card in the Command Zone to care about strict quantity of counters on cards like an animate Calendar, unless you count Maester Seymour…who just might be an interesting Commander, in terms of translating arbitrary counters into stats. Huh. In any case, being able to threaten wins with Calendar through its actual printed condition, through a combo with our Commander, or even through actual combat by way of Luxior is absolutely hilarious, and does a lot to show that a large enough number will always do something silly, no matter how desultory its purpose.
Until next time, bye Felisa.
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