Coven Counters precon upgrade guide

Leinore draws a card each combat if three of your creatures have different powers, and this box already clears that. What it lacks is anything else that draws off its 39 creatures, so the swaps add two cards that do and fix the mana underneath them.

Leinore, Autumn Sovereign puts a +1/+1 counter on up to one creature at the beginning of your combat, then draws a card if you control three creatures with different powers. The counter goes first, so it can be the thing that creates the third power. The box rarely needs the help. Its 39 creatures, Leinore counted, print power 0 (six of them), 1 (eight), 2 (eight), 3 (eleven), 4 (five) and 5 (one).

Leinore isn’t the only card reading that spread. Dawnhart Wardens, Stalwart Pathlighter and Wall of Mourning are coven cards too, and Sigardian Zealot, Sigarda's Vanguard, Celestial Judgment and Celebrate the Harvest all count or choose among different powers. That is eight cards built on one condition, and the stock deck meets it without trying.

The condition isn’t the weak point. Casting the creatures is. Of 39 creatures, one card pays you in cards for casting them, and it is Lifecrafter's Bestiary, which asks for {G} every time. The mana under them has a second problem: five of the 37 lands tap for colourless only, in a deck where both colours are short on double pips.

Ten swaps cost $23.74. Two of them draw cards off the creature count, one keeps the powers apart, two stack on Leinore’s counter, two are removal, and three replace the colourless lands.

What are the best Coven Counters upgrades?

Buy from the top and stop wherever the budget does. Each price is for whichever released printing is cheapest today (October 2026), promos included.

1. Beast Whisperer ($4.87). Draws a card for each creature spell you cast, with no payment. Once it is out, the other 40 creatures in the list each draw a card, Leinore included when she comes down from the command zone. It asks for two green mana at four, and green is already one of the two short colours.
2. Mentor of the Meek ($0.18). Pay {1} and draw whenever another creature with power 2 or less enters. 23 other creatures in the list print power 2 or less, and so do the Eldrazi Spawn from Growth Spasm, the Spirits from Custodi Soulbinders, the Humans from Sigarda, Heron's Grace, and the Snake and Wolf from Bestial Menace.
3. Cathars' Crusade ($4.49). Whenever a creature enters under your control, each creature you control gets a +1/+1 counter. The gaps between powers survive, because everything rises together, and that is the thing coven needs.
4. Hardened Scales ($1.86) and Conclave Mentor ($0.34). Each adds one to every group of +1/+1 counters you would put on a creature. They stack, and the section below does the arithmetic.
5. Path to Exile ($0.81) and Generous Gift ($0.92). One white mana exiles a creature, and three destroy any permanent at instant speed. Path lets the creature’s controller fetch a basic land, and Gift gives its controller a 3/3 Elephant.
6. Temple Garden ($6.50), Branchloft Pathway ($3.47) and Sunpetal Grove ($0.30). Three green-white lands that can enter untapped, replacing three that make only colourless mana.

None of the ten is a Game Changer, which leaves the bracket floor at 1. The seven cards and three lands that come out are further down.

Five colourless lands down to two

Five of the 37 lands tap for colourless only: Temple of the False God, Rogue's Passage, Blighted Woodland, Krosan Verge and Myriad Landscape. Three of them come out. Blighted Woodland and Myriad Landscape both sacrifice themselves for basics, so they stay.

The land count is still 37 and the basics are still 24. Always-tapped lands drop from five to four, and conditional ones rise from two to four. Branchloft Pathway is the unconditional one of the three, because it always enters untapped.

Both colours remain short on double pips. At 90% on the play the calculator wants 36 sources for two pips by turn three. The deck had 28 of each colour and now has 30, and the chance of having two pips on time moves from 78.5% to 82.2% in both colours. For one pip by turn two it moves from 93.8% to 95.1%. Eight green spells want GG, and Beast Whisperer replaces Biogenic Upgrade as one of them. Eleven white spells want WW against twelve in the box.

Branchloft Pathway swaps one for one with Krosan Verge in the source count, because the counter treats both as able to make either colour. In play the Pathway is one colour once it’s down, so I’m buying it for tempo rather than for the number. It replaces a land that enters tapped.

Average mana value falls from 3.85 to 3.55, because the seven spells coming in cost 19 mana between them and the seven going out cost 38.

Three counters a turn, from one trigger

Leinore puts one counter on one creature, so by herself she moves a creature up one power per turn. Add Hardened Scales and she puts two. Add Conclave Mentor as well and she puts three. The two replacement effects each add one regardless of what else is out, so the total is the printed number plus the number of effects.

The same arithmetic runs through the rest of the list. Citadel Siege in Khans mode, which the box already runs, puts two counters at the start of your combat. With both effects out that is four. Victory’s Envoy puts a counter on each other creature at your upkeep, so each of them gets three. Verdurous Gearhulk distributes four counters among up to four targets, and each target it picks gets the extra one, so spreading them out is what the effects reward.

Conclave Mentor isn’t a Human. It’s a Centaur Cleric, so it misses Kyler, Sigardian Emissary and the Riders of Gavony protection. It does gain you life equal to its power when it dies, which on a board where Leinore keeps pointing counters at things is more than the 2 it prints.

Cathars' Crusade is the odd one out because it raises every creature at once. With six powers on the table it keeps all six apart, and each creature entering is its own trigger, so a Bestial Menace is three counters on everything you control.

Seven spells and three lands make room

Death's Presence costs six and does nothing until a creature of yours dies, then puts counters on one creature. Leinore does that for four mana every turn and draws a card as well, and very little else in the box wants creatures to die.

Curse of Conformity and Curse of Clinging Webs are both Auras that touch one opponent out of three. Conformity makes that player’s nonlegendary creatures 3/3 and strips their types, which grows their small creatures as readily as it shrinks their big ones. Clinging Webs exiles their dying creature and hands me a 1/2 Spider with reach. It is a fair effect and it is a long way from what the other 98 cards are doing.

Trostani's Summoner costs seven for a 1/1 and three tokens, a 2/2 Knight, a 3/3 Centaur and a 4/4 Rhino. Somberwald Beastmaster costs seven for a 1/1 Human and three tokens of the same sizes, a 2/2 Wolf and two Beasts at 3/3 and 4/4, plus deathtouch on every creature token you control. They cost the same and make tokens of the same sizes, one of them is a Human with deathtouch on top, and it stays. Either set of tokens puts powers 2, 3 and 4 on the table, which is a coven by the next combat.

Biogenic Upgrade is a six-mana sorcery. It distributes three counters among up to three creatures and doubles them, which comes to six counters however they are spread. Citadel Siege does two a turn for four mana, and Cathars' Crusade does more than that once the board is wide.

Return to Dust costs four with two white pips and exiles an artifact or enchantment, which is a narrow answer. Ruinous Intrusion stays because it also puts counters on a creature. Beast Within, Generous Gift and Cleansing Nova’s second mode cover the same ground.

Hour of Reckoning is the one card in the list with three white pips, and it costs seven before convoke. It destroys every nontoken creature, mine included. Celestial Judgment counts powers the way Leinore does, and Cleansing Nova is the flexible one. A third that kills all of my own nontoken creatures isn’t needed.

A deck with 41 creatures running two sweepers needs a reason, and the reason is that they choose differently. Celestial Judgment leaves one creature per power, picked by me. The box has six powers, so after it resolves I can keep up to six, and the tokens and the biggest creature of each power are the ones I would choose.

Cleansing Nova destroys all creatures or, as its other mode, all artifacts and enchantments, so it is also an answer to a table that isn’t winning through creatures. Angel of Glory's Rise is the recovery card after either: it exiles all Zombies on the battlefield, then returns every Human creature card from my graveyard to the battlefield. It costs seven and it stays anyway, because with 28 Humans in the list the rebuild is bigger than most.

The three lands are the colourless ones. Temple of the False God makes {C}{C} once five lands are out and makes nothing of either colour the deck is short on. Rogue's Passage makes one creature unblockable for four mana and its own tap. Krosan Verge enters tapped and taps for colourless, with a two-mana sacrifice that fetches a Forest and a Plains.

The off-type cards that stay

Plenty of the creatures aren’t Humans, though Humans are still 28 of the 41 in the upgraded list, 68%. But Leinore doesn’t care about types. She cares about power, and the non-Humans cover the spread: Dearly Departed is the only 5-power creature, and five 4-power creatures (Angel of Glory's Rise, Sigarda, Heron's Grace, Enduring Scalelord, Verdurous Gearhulk and Moorland Rescuer) fill the top of it. Dearly Departed also does something from the graveyard, giving each Human I control an additional +1/+1 counter as it enters.

Wall of Mourning is flagged as an off-type Wall and stays for a different reason. It is a coven card that exiles one card face down per opponent when it enters, then puts one of them into my hand at each end step while the coven holds. In a pod of three opponents that is three exiled cards, with one coming back each turn.

Four I’d rather be recommending

Archangel of Thune ($18.72) puts a +1/+1 counter on each creature I control whenever I gain life. The list has few ways to gain life besides Heron's Grace Champion, Shamanic Revelation and Conclave Mentor, so it is mostly its own enabler, and it would be a fifteenth five-drop.

Guardian Project ($13.10) draws for each nontoken creature that enters with a name nothing else has. A singleton list passes almost every time, so it is a second draw engine of the same shape as Beast Whisperer, at $8.23 more.

Heroic Intervention ($9.05) gives my permanents hexproof and indestructible until end of turn. It is the card that lets the board survive a destroy-based sweeper from another player. At $9.05 it costs more than any spell among the ten, so it comes after them.

Smothering Tithe ($56.23) is a Game Changer, so it takes the list from a Bracket 1 floor to Bracket 3. The bracket change matters more than the price, and it is why it isn’t among the ten.

The upgraded decklist

All 100 cards after the swaps. Hover a name to see the card.

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“Load into the deck builder” opens this list in your account, pinned to the printings the box shipped, ready to edit or save. “Copy decklist” gives you plain text for Moxfield, Archidekt or Arena, with no account needed.

FAQ

Does Leinore draw a card every turn?

Only when three creatures you control have different powers, and she checks once, after her own counter has landed. That order matters, because the counter can be what makes a third power. In this box the powers run from 0 to 5 across 39 creatures, so any four of them show three different powers about 80% of the time, and any five about 92%. The board that fails is one where nearly everything shares a power, such as a pile of 1/1 tokens. Dawnhart Wardens, Stalwart Pathlighter and Wall of Mourning are stricter: they check when they trigger and again when they resolve.

Do Hardened Scales and Conclave Mentor stack?

Yes. Each one adds one to every group of +1/+1 counters you would put on a creature, so with both out Leinore’s single counter becomes three. Citadel Siege in Khans mode puts four where it put two, and Victory’s Envoy gives each other creature three counters at your upkeep instead of one. A second Conclave Mentor would add another, but this list runs one.

Which Game Changer would fit, and what would it do to the bracket?

Smothering Tithe is the one I’d look at, and its cheapest printing is $56.23. It is a Game Changer, so one copy lifts the list from a Bracket 1 floor to Bracket 3, because Bracket 2 allows none. The ten swaps on this page include none, so the floor stays at 1.

What do the ten swaps cost?

$23.74 at the cheapest released printing, as of October 2026. The three lands are $10.27 together (Temple Garden $6.50, Branchloft Pathway $3.47, Sunpetal Grove $0.30). The seven spells are $13.47 together, and Mentor of the Meek is 18 cents of it. The cheapest printing can be a promo, so the copy you buy may differ from the one in the box.

What should Riders of Gavony name?

Whatever creature type is most common in front of you at the table, since the protection only works against creatures of that type. It covers Humans, and 28 of the 41 creatures in the upgraded list are Humans, so it protects most of the board. Naming Human is legal, and then yours can’t be blocked by or take damage from opposing Humans, which is worth it only if the pod is full of them.

What does Celestial Judgment actually leave behind?

One creature for each different power on the battlefield, and you choose which one. It counts every player’s creatures, so if an opponent has a 7-power creature and you have none, that creature has to be the survivor for its power. With six powers on your own side it can leave you six creatures.