There are a number of evergreen archetypes that Wizards goes back to when a color pair doesn't have anything in particular it wants to do in a set. These are especially visible in core set Limited environments, which are designed to both teach new players what color combinations usually do and to "reset" enfranchised players back to basics, so to speak. While there are a number of these with enough history to write about – U/R spells, W/B lifegain, and so on – what I wanted to focus on in this article is the +1/+1 counter archetype, which sets itself apart from its coworkers by its flexibility. What we think of as a "counter theme" is actually several themes that happen to use +1/+1 counters, each of which is worth exploring in some depth.
