The Top 11 Life Counter Apps for Magic Ranked

Last updated on February 12, 2026

Doubling Cube | Illustration by Volta Creation

Oh no! You’ve made it all the way to your buddy’s place for your weekly Commander night, and you’ve forgotten your Crown Royal bag of dice! The last time this happened, you all had to keep track of life with pen and paper, like barbarians. But don’t worry, it’s the 2020s and you have your iPhone and a WiFi connection, so a slew of Magic: The Gathering life counter apps are available to download at a moment’s notice.

There are dozens and dozens of MTG life counter apps available on the App Store, but which ones are the best?

Lucky for you, I’ve punished my iPhone’s memory with just about every app I could find so I could narrow it down for you!

Best Overall: Lifetap

When I went into this article, I was surprised by how much I liked Lifetap. I’d been a diehard Carbon user for years, but as soon as I got comfortable with Lifetap’s interface, my eyes were opened. The simple truth is Lifetap has all the functionality you need to track everything in a game of Magic: commander damage, poison counters, energy counters, floating mana, Planechase planes, Archenemy schemes, etc., plus it has enough customization built-in that you can fine tune the aesthetics to your liking. Best of all, it’s free to download with no ads.

Why Use a Life Counter App in the First Place?

It’s true, Magic players have been tracking life totals without apps for decades, so why should you start now? Even without a prerelease kit, or a bundle you probably managed to accumulate a bunch of dice. We all know they are never jostled out of place by the slightest shake of the table. Oh, and we all absolutely love twirling a non-spindown d20 endlessly trying to find the next number up or down. Plus, without dice to track life, when would I ever get to break out my nearly illegible Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth spindown d20? Seriously, can anybody read this thing?

Or perhaps you’re a die-hard who only uses pen-and-paper to track life. This does have its advantages: Keeping notes on life and crossing out previous life totals can help track who took which damage when and for how much. Typically, life is tracked on paper by creating a column for each player and doing some elementary subtraction from the totals as the game progresses. This works fine until you have to start tracking additional totals like commander damage, commander tax, poison counters, energy counters, experience counters, or even floating mana. Commander games tracked on paper quickly become a mess.

Criteria for Choosing the Best Apps

The best MTG life counter apps should have at least a couple of these key benefits:

• They should solve all of the aforementioned problems with using dice and paper to track life.
• They should be easy to read on a phone screen from across the table, and players should be able to modify their own life totals and counters without fumbling into others’ fingers or accidentally changing their total.
• They won’t be oppressive to look at, and they’ll offer bonus features like digital dice rolling, random player selection, Planechase and Archenemy support, or even mood music.
• They’ll offer customization to make the life counter work best for you.

#11. LifeElk

LifeElk’s free version is a pretty basic set-up; it supports life counting for up to six players and can track poison, commander damage, and energy for each. It can roll a d6 or flip a coin, and you can pay $2.99 to remove the ad bar at the bottom of the screen. Fairly basic functionality, but at least it lets you choose the color of your tracker using a full spectrum.

#10. Lifelinker

Collected Company’s Lifelinker, associated with The Command Zone podcast, is on the simpler side of MTG life counters. It counts life, that’s for sure, but that’s about it. Its main menu includes an option to keep your device’s screen awake while playing, but most phones and tablets can already do that innately. It has a spinner in the center to help you decide who goes first, and is pretty easy on the battery life!

#9. Dragon Counter

Dragon Counter is your run-of-the-mill life counting app. It’s got all the specs we expect for the free version: a life counter, a commander damage tracker, and all the other fixins’ are just a long press away. Personally, I’m a big fan of the ability to scroll your life total up and down. This allows you to quickly change your life total after that big haymaker from an opponent, no need to tap on the screen for a full 30 seconds while you count out damage. You can’t customize layouts, but it does include a dark mode option.

If you choose to unlock the Pro version for $5, you unlock the ability to customize colors, roll virtual dice, and have access to a game history. That’s not really enough extra function for your money, in my opinion.

#8. LifeTotal

Talisman Games’s LifeTotal looks nice enough, and it launches directly into a game when it’s opened. I’m not a huge fan of its UI, but the life addition/subtraction buttons are clearly labeled. It can support up to six players, but it doesn’t let you change the layout of the table. Plus, these options are hidden in a menu that’s only accessible by tapping the “M” in the center of the screen. Once you find them, there are options to change the starting totals and a d6 roller, but not much else. My final gripe is that you change from counting life totals to other counters by swiping up on your life total. This took me a bit to get the hang of, and I can imagine a scenario where I’m constantly picking my phone up from the center of the table to fumble with my commander damage.

There’s also the problem of the price to remove advertisements. I’m okay paying $4.99 if I’m unlocking additional features, but a $5 bill just to stop distracting me with a moving ad at the bottom of my life total is just a little too much.

#7. Moxtopper

Moxtopper is the edgy cousin of the life counter family. Sassy KO messages, neon lights themes, and support for up to 10 players are what sets this app apart. Moxtopper includes a ton of different themes for the player playmats and the app’s icon, and it can generate a line graph of player life totals at the end of the game. You can upload custom photos as your playmat for $5, too. The only thing it lacks is a dice rolling mechanic. You can randomly generate the starting player, but if you ever need to actually roll some dice, Moxtopper can’t help you. Also, you know the folks who made it are fun because they included all these goofy messages in the app! Haha, so quirky!

#6. Carbon

Carbon is the ol’ tried-and-true as far as MTG life counter apps go. Carbon has a simple design with plain flat colors for each player’s life total. Its intuitive controls mean most players pick up how to modify their life totals immediately by tapping above and below the number.

Carbon’s Pro version costs $4.99, but it gives you access to some cool effects like a marker for the city’s blessing, the monarch, and a “kill players” animation. But even without the upgrade, Carbon is one of the best for its simplicity and legibility.

#5. Magic Life Counter

Ajfek Software’s Magic Life Counter has more functionality on offer than any other life counter on the market. However, unlocking all that functionality costs a whopping $10. With a modular home screen, you can easily add or remove any kind of tracker you’ll need (including Archenemy schemes and Planechase planes) and rearrange them however you like. Want to keep all your experience counters at the top of our screen? You can easily drag and drop any of the counter widgets around.

Magic Life Counter also has a game history tracker, and lets you save game profiles to easily restart a game with all the trackers you’ll need preloaded. While this is the most expensive life counter on the list, you definitely get the bang for your buck.

#4. Counterspell

Counterspell is a life tracking app available on the App store and Google Play store. It’s got similar functions to the rest of the life counter apps, with the same options to track life, commander damage, infect damage, and total number of times a commander’s been cast. While these are all fine, I’ve found the actual interaction with the app to be a bit clunky. It includes an interactive tutorial, which helps a bit. Maybe I’ve just been too deep in the weeds of life-tracker apps and have developed muscle memory for what I think the easiest way to add and subtract life is. At least it lets you choose between whether you’d like to tap or swipe to change life totals, a choice many other apps make for you.

Counterspell does offer a way to track who’s attacking whom, and it saves this data in a game history tab for you to view later. It also offers a leaderboard for tracking your games, but this feature is only unlocked after making a donation. Donations can be anywhere from $1.99 to $18.99, and a single donation at any tier unlocks all pro features, including an appearance customizer. Counterspell has all the features you need in a life tracker app, and several you don’t but are still nice to have. The Achievements section (for achievements like “The Vampire – Steal a bunch of life via lifelink”) make the app feel more personal, like we’re getting to know the developer. I already have too many friends in my life, as I’m the most popular person I know, so this feature doesn’t really sell it for me. Choose from a library of hundreds of characters from Magic’s history. It’s even got auto-generated landscape playmats based on color combinations, too! My only complaint is with so much going on on-screen, it can be hard to tell at a glance what the life totals are all set at.

#3. Lotus

Lotus has a lot going for it. Besides its simple and easy-to-read design, Vanilla b.v.’s Lotus also has a built-in timer to track how long you have left in a round. Plus, it’s got a card image search that’ll display prices pulled from TCGplayer. Plus, they’ve included a simplified summary of the basic rules, useful for pulling up quick definitions or wordings on specific rules.

Lotus also stands out for its game history archive, where it saves previous games however you left them. If you, like me, are also irrevocably brain-poisoned by your phone and constantly picking it up to fidget or reply to messages without thinking, this saves you the embarrassment of having to recall where everyone’s life total was and who had taken how much damage from which commanders.

#2. Playgroup

Playgroup.gg is an app available on the App Store and Google Play Store. It’s billed as a “Commander Tracker,” but it can be used for any sort of Magic: The Gathering game to track life totals and various other counters. It’s got all the functions and mechanics you’ve come to love in a life-tracker app; it tracks commander damage and infect damage, and it lets you choose if the damage you’re dealing has lifelink or other effects. The turn tracker highlights who’s turn it is and lets players pass the turn around the board with an easy visual cue. It even has an upkeep reminder to stop you on your upkeep when the turn is passed to you!

The biggest draw for Playgroup.gg is its stats-tracking for individual players. Any player with a Playgroup.gg account can sign in to the app at the beginning of the game to record the stats from their games. Who did the most damage in this game? Is my Dakkon Blackblade deck really winning more games than my General Marhault Elsdragon deck? What’s my win-loss ratio versus my buddy’s Clavileño, First of the Blessed deck? All these statistics are recorded and stored in your playgroup’s account, where you can review them anytime you want!

Playgroup hones in on the social aspect of Commander gameplay in a way the rest of the life tracker apps don’t. When a game ends, it prompts you first to record the type of victory and confirm who removed whom from the game. Then, it lets each player vote on how they felt about that game, and how salty it made you.

Finally, a leaderboard is accessible on their site at playgroup.gg, where each of your playgroups games are recorded, complete with an ELO ranking system and average damage-per-game calculator.

My one and only gripe with Playgroup is the design of the actual app. It’s a bit dark on my aging, 30-plus-year-old eyes, and its orientation sensor seems to be out-of-whack with my iPad (this could just be user error, but I’m fairly confident in my ability to navigate my own tablet’s settings, so perhaps not). 

Ultimately, Playgroup is the life tracker app for the group that wants some serious records of their win-loss ratios, but it may have too many bells and whistles for the player that just needs something to tick numbers up and down.

#1. Lifetap

Lifetap’s another life counter app that launches straight into a game when opened, but it has so much more going for it. Along with the standard features we’ve come to expect, Lifetap includes trackers for everything in the game, including poison counters, commander damage (it automatically ticks down life totals), the monarch (automatically switches from player to player when selected), the initiative, and the city’s blessing. It’s so customizable, too. The settings menu lets you modify just about everything. You can increase the font size, set the menu to auto-hide, enable or disable Planechase and Archenemy, change the layout of the board in multiplayer games, even enable a “webcam mode” for display on stream.

My favorite part is the ability to create and save player profiles with names and playmats. In the example images, I’ve saved my name and a playmat featuring Richard Kane-Ferguson’s Animate Wall.

Honorable Mentions

Life Trinket

Life Trinket is an in-browser life tracker app that’s not available on either the App Store or Google Play store, but it functions with any mobile web browser. It’s got many of the same functions as of other apps; tracking life, commander damage from individual players and their commanders, poison counters, energy counters, commander tax, and just about everything else. I like that it lets you choose a background color for your life total (something my playgroup finds very important). Best of all, it’s designed with the knowledge you run it from your mobile browser, so it automatically hides your browser bar when you start the game.

Life Trinket doesn’t require you to make an account, a huge plus for me since I’m tired of giving out my email and coming up with new passwords for everything, but it still saves your games should you accidentally close the browser. It maxes out at six players, though, and the sliding scale for starting health is locked to intervals of 10 ranging from 20 to 60. It lets you change layouts from one player per edge to the “two on two” layout at the start of the game, but not mid-game.

Overall, Life Trinket is the best life tracker app for the player who doesn’t want to download an app. Since it runs right out of your browser, you don’t need to fill up your phone/tablet's memory with a battery-draining animation-heavy life tracker while still maintaining the functionality and key features you actually need to run the game.

Mutility

Mutility’s name doesn’t lie; it’s truly the utilitarian MTG life counter. Basic life counting and starting life total options, blisteringly bright colors for the counters, and a roll-off mechanic with a simple animation. Of course, most of the customization is locked behind the $3.99 paywall, meaning you won’t have access to the life tracker history or the other colors or any additional counters until you cough up. Also, that app icon is ugly as sin, sorry.

Companion

WotC has you install Companion as the official app, and if you play in a store event, it may be necessary to submit your game results. It tracks life for up to 6 players with presets by format. It also allows you to host an event of your own, has a store locator, and a card database with official rulings. Login with the same account you use to get around MTG Arena and get on with your game!

Wrap Up

Wall of Fortune | Illustration by Tom Babbey

It’s true nobody needs a life counter app on their phone, but with such a plethora of cool apps available, it’s worth it to find one you like, just in case. You don’t necessarily need an app with all these cool bells and whistles, but if you’re looking to take your digital accessories for Magic to the next level, this might be your next upgrade. And it's always good manners to track your life effectively, and in a way that it's clear for all your opponents.

Do you think life counter apps are worth the trouble? What do you use to track life in your games? Let me know in the comments, or over on Draftsim’s Discord.

Thank you for reading, and keep an eye on those life totals!