There’s nothing more frustrating in Magic: The Gathering than falling prey to blue’s most annoying gimmick: the Counterspell. Blue’s entire color identity is about controlling the flow of play and manipulating both the battlefield and players’ hands with magic. For a relatively low cost, someone playing blue can counter almost any spell, regardless of how expensive, essentially making that spell a total waste of time and mana. That’s what makes any sort of counter to counterspells so darn satisfying. Though the Spider-Man set doesn’t have a ton of compelling cards to offer, Spider-Punk stands out as an elite red card that’s viable in most game formats, mainly because of one ability: Spells and abilities can’t be countered. As long as he remains on the board, it essentially disables counterspells across the entire table. At four-player Commander tables, that has a huge impact.
But move over Spider-Punk, aka Hobart “Hobie” Brown, because there’s a new counterspell troll in the game — or rather, counterspell boggart. With the worldwide debut of the upcoming Lorwyn Eclipsed set on Jan. 5, Wizards of the Coast revealed the goblin sorcerer called Hexing Squelcher.
Hexing Squelcher is a 2/2 that costs one colorless and one red mana. It can’t be countered and has a Ward cost of “Pay 2 life,” so it can’t be targeted by any spells unless the caster gives up two life. But it also has “Spells you control can’t be countered” and gives the same ward to other creatures you control. (Name-wise, Hexing Squelcher seems like an obvious riff on Vexing Shusher from the Shadowmoor set, a red-green creature that, for the cost of one red or one green mana, could make it so that a target spell could not be countered.)
Compare that to Spider-Punk: It’s a 2/1 with the same cost. It disables counters for the entire board and makes it so that damage cannot be prevented. It also has riot (it enters with a +1/+1 counter or haste) and gives all of your spiders riot.
Because of the limitation on Spider-Punk’s riot-gifting ability (it only effects spiders), it functions best in a spider-focused deck. And because it’s a Legendary creature, that only further limits its potential. In Commander, where you can only have one unique copy of any card in your deck anyway, Legendary isn’t a big deal. But in more traditional game formats, where you can have up to four copies of a card in your deck, Legendary means you can only have one version of the card on the board at any given time. Even that’s not too big of a deal considering both cards disable counters as a blanket effect. But Hexing Squelcher makes it so that “spells YOU control” can’t be countered, whereas Spider-Punk does it for ALL spells. And if you’re feeling super-redundant, you can fill up your board with Hexing Squelchers to ensure that your opponent never counters any of your spells ever again. Even if they remove up to three of them, as long as one remains on the board, you’re safe from the torment of a counterspell.
That difference is most apparent in four-player Commander. Spider-Punk helps at least two opposing players in that scenario, whereas Hexing Squelcher helps only you. And because goblin is such a common and popular creature type, the Squelcher is about to become a vital component in virtually every goblin deck moving forward. Heck, it’s worth including in almost any deck that even dips red. It’ll be interesting to see how it might get incorporated into professional tier decks, particularly where blue-red remains the most popular color combo.
For now, the Magic scene awaits the grand debut of Hexing Squelcher when Lorwyn Eclipsed has Play Early events at local game stores from Jan. 15 to 22 before a full release on Jan. 23.
