MTG Counterspells By color

What are the best MTG counterspells?

The best MTG counterspells are the ones players actually reach for, and most of them are blue: countering a spell is blue's share of the color pie. The lists below rank the most played blue counterspells, then the white, black, red, green and colorless counterspells that tracked Commander decks run, and then the color combinations with enough of them to rank, ordered by how many decks run each card and counted from real games on Playgroup.gg. White taxes a spell instead of countering it outright, black charges life for the few it has, red mostly answers blue, and green almost never counters a spell and protects its own from being countered instead, so those four lists are short on purpose and are shown in full.

Deck counts are drawn from 165,328 tracked decks on Playgroup.gg.

Lists last computed 24 Sep 2026 from decks and games tracked on Playgroup.gg.

Multicolor counterspells

A card is counted under its exact color identity, so a counterspell needing two or three colors is on none of the single-color lists above. Those cards are here instead, one list per color combination that enough tracked decks run.

How these counterspell lists are built

Start with what the order means, because it shapes everything else on this page. These lists are ranked by how many tracked decks run each card, not by a rating and not by the measurement. Separately we compare decks that run a card against decks on the same commander that do not, pool those matched comparisons, and ask whether the difference is bigger than chance. Only a handful of cards clear that bar. The rest are played widely and honestly, and we cannot tell you they help.

That is why the lists are ordered by deck count rather than by the measurement. Sorting a list by a number whose confidence interval crosses zero for most of its rows would be ranking sampling error and calling it insight. Deck count is a smaller claim, but it is one the data can actually carry, and it answers the question people arrive with: which counterspells do Commander players put in their decks?

The win-rate lift is therefore a marker, not the ranking. It appears beside a card only when that card has been played enough to judge and its measured effect is clearly positive, which means clearing minimums on games with the card, on how many separate commander groups it was seen in and on how many different pilots played it, with a cap on how much of the sample any one pilot may hold, and then landing entirely above zero. A card that was measured and came out flat gets an empty cell rather than a number near zero, because a number near zero reads as a verdict and this one is not. Outside blue you should expect almost no figures at all: the four short lists are small and the cards on them are played too rarely to measure.

Read that figure as a difference, not a multiplier. A +2.2% lift means a deck running the card wins 2.2 percentage points more often than decks on the same commander without it: 27.2% of its games rather than 25.0%. It is not a 2.2% relative increase, and it is not a claim that the card wins 2.2% of your games on its own.

Why this is one page and not six

Counterspells are split unevenly between the colors, and the split is the answer most people arrive looking for. Blue is the only list here long enough to need folding; the other five are short enough to show whole. A separate page per color would leave five pages with almost nothing on them, so they share this one instead.

The candidate pool is every Commander-legal card carrying Scryfall's counterspell oracle tag, which is a human-curated tag rather than a text search, narrowed to the cards whose own text counters a spell. That narrowing matters more here than on our other lists. Scryfall tags anything that interacts with a spell on the stack, so the raw tag also carries cards that bounce a spell back to its owner's hand, exile it, or counter an ability rather than a spell, and those were topping the white and green lists. Cards like Reprieve, Sink into Stupor and Mindbreak Trap answer a spell without countering it, and they are excluded for that reason. Multicolor cards are not excluded; every card is counted under its exact color identity, which is why a counterspell needing white and blue is on the Azorius list rather than on the white list or the blue list. That is what someone searching for green counterspells wants, mono-green cards they can put in any green deck, and it is also what someone searching for azorius counterspells wants. Each surviving card is counted across every non-archived tracked deck whose mainboard contains it, so a card nobody has sleeved up does not appear at all.

Counts are drawn from 165,328 tracked decks on Playgroup.gg.

The counterspell oracle tag comes from Scryfall and popularity across public decklists is answered better by EDHREC than by us. What we add is the count from decks that were actually played, and the measured effect on winning where there is one to report.

Counted from decks and games tracked on Playgroup.gg. Every card name links to its full stat page.