In Magic The Gathering, the Brokers are New Capenna’s crime family of corrupt lawyers and lawmakers. The Brokers run numerous protection rackets across the city, led by the bird demon Falco Spara from his tower, the Nido Sanctuary. While they’ll happily protect you and your business from the other four families, failure to pay up can be catastrophic.The Brokers look after their own, though, which comes in the form of shield counters. Providing small boosts of indestructibility to your creatures, these new types of counters are much more flexible than you may expect.
What Are Shield Counters?
In the context of the game’s rules, counters technically aren’t anything. They’re simply markers placed on cards to signify that card acts in a different way than it normally does. For example, a creature with a +1/+1 counter on it has its power and toughness raised from the usual base amount, while a Saga uses lore counters to track its chapters.
Introduced in Streets of New Capenna, shield counters are one-off sources of indestructibility. If a creature with a shield counter would take any amount of damage damage, or be destroyed via another effect, the shield counter will fall of the creature instead, with the creature remaining unharmed.
Like indestructibility, shield counters aren’t a sure-fire way to keep a creature on the battlefield. Shield counters only prevent damage (such as blocking a creature or being hit by a lightning bolt) or destruction effects, like a Murder or a board wipe. They don’t stop the creature with the shield counter from being exiled, returned to your hand, or sacrificed.
Like all other counters, if the creature leaves the battlefield for any reason, the counters fall off of it. However, unlike keyword counters (such as flying or trample counters), shield counters stack. If a creature has multiple shield counters on it, they will fall off one by one rather than at the same time. For example, a creature with three shield counters on it can take three sources of damage or destruction before it’s vulnerable.
When a creature with a shield counter is dealt damage, the damage is prevented as a replacement effect. This is important for if your opponent is using a creature with an ability like lifelink – as no damage is dealt to your creature, they won’t gain any life from it.
However, if the source of damage explicitly says it can’t be prevented, shield counters will do nothing. For example, if an opponent uses Bonecrusher Giant’s Stomp adventure on your creature with a shield counter, it will still take three damage. Even worse, the counter still falls off.
An obscure ruling worth keeping track of relates to the older card Palliation Accord. First printed in Dissension, the card text says it creates shield counters. However, these are not the same thing as New Capenna’s shield counters, and the card has been errata'd to use “Palliation Counters” instead.
How To Use Shield Counters
There are lots of ways to get shield counters onto your creatures.
The most common way is by having the creature enter the battlefield with one put on it already. Cards like Dapper Shieldmate, Disciplined Duelist, Swooping Protector, and Rhox Pummeler all enter with shield counters. Unfortunately, they also lack ways to replenish the shield counters once they’ve lost them, meaning you have to rely on the less common other methods to keep them protected.
There are ways to put shield counters on a target creature already on the battlefield, thanks to cards like Boon of Safety, Contractual Safeguard, Brokers Veteran, and Kros, Defense Contractor.
When playing with shield counters, you’ll want to borrow some strategies from older counter-based decks. In particular, the liberal use of proliferate. Proliferate is common in the Brokers’ colours of green, white, and blue, and allows you to put another counter a permanent already owns onto it. Most of the time players use this to increase +1/+1 or Planeswalker loyalty counters, but shield is a very appealing target to pick as well thanks to its stacking properties.
Anything that can move counters around is also a good shout when playing with shields. Cards like The Ozolith and Resourceful Defense preserve counters after the creature leaves the battlefield (such as when it’s flickered), giving you an easy way to stock up on shield counters before throwing them all onto another creature.
What Colour Are Shield Counters?
As shield counters were introduced as the faction mechanic for the green, white, and blue Brokers family in Streets of New Capenna, every card printed for it so far is found in those colours.
As of Streets of New Capenna (and Commander 2022), there are 20 cards mention shield counters in some way. Of them, there are 14 mono-colour cards: six are white, four are blue, and four are green.
The rest are multicolour cards: one is Simic (blue/green), while the remaining five are all Bant (green, white, and blue). There are no colourless shield counter cards.