Making Magic the Gathering games more manageable

I am still very new to playing Magic: The Gathering and at home and local events I have mainly stuck to commander so far. One thing that I find is that sometimes things can get a little "messy" or it can be hard to keep track of everything that is going on. With so many cards in play, exile and graveyards and counters for every possible thing it can appear a bit over whelming.

Also as most people reading this will be aware I make wooden gaming accessories (Shock horror lol) and I decided to see if there are items which I can make to try and make the management whilst playing a little bit simpler. I started planning out what my main issues were. For me personally it was tracking 3 different incoming commander damages and the counters... so many counters. Now I know that some of you minimalists are going to say well we just use dice, Thats great and obviously it works else you wouldnt be doing it but for me I dont like having a handful of different dice scattered around keeping track of different things.

First up I made the commander zone which allowed me to keep my commander separate to the play but also allowed me to have a place to put a HP counter, keep track of how many times I had played my commander and to track the damage I was taking from the other 3 players in one space with easy to read and use magnetically rotating parts. It doesn't take up loads of space on the table and is also slim so can be packed away easy between games. Now this was great as it meant I could keep all this in one space out of the way whilst playing without worrying about knocking the dice flying or loosing track of who did what damage. Also it meant I could customise it to suit my game. Playing Mono Red - No problem I can stain it red. Playing a Kraken deck. Fantastic I can engrave a Kraken theme HP counter. 

After quite a few games now I can say that this is probably one of my most used accessories when playing commander and it has made a difference in keeping the table a bit more organised.

The Second issue which I had was counters (+1/+1) kind of ones. Now again I know you can get the dice style ones with a handful of +1 to +6 and -1 to -6 which are great (I have some myself) but what if you need +1/+0 or something to that effect. Thats the dice out of the window. Also if you have a deck with a high counter or like to proliferate then it can be a pain to keep constantly wasting time turning your dice over 1000 times to find the number you were looking for. 

You can get specific engraved counters which I looked at making but the issue I had with this is that you would need 100s of different tokens to cover the possibilities that come up during play. Whilst doable you would again be spending far to long looking for the one you need just to have that number change on the next turn and be on the hunt for a counter again. This lead me to essentially make a mini HP counter. It can be placed on top of your cards as normal and will allow you to go to +10/+10 and anything inbetween. +3/+0 no problem. Adding this to the +2/+2 you already have not an issue and all on 1 small counter. I think this is a much more elegant way of keeping track of counters and when not in use they attach to each other as well to save space.

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