Thanks to a dizzying amount of support, +1/+1 counters are one of the most popular deck types in MTG Commander. With tons of Commanders to choose from, a fair few strong options end up getting buried. Tromell, Seymour’s Butler, for example, does everything a +1/+1 counter deck could ever need on a budget, and can even go infinite.
MTG Trommel, Seymour’s Butler
Thanks to its counter-generating abilities, Tromell, Seymour’s Butler can easily turn even your smallest creatures into a massive army. This makes MTG’s best +1/+1 counter support like Hardened Scales or Doubling Season free adds, since Tromell alone enables them. Protecting your buffed board is trivial, too, with The Ozolith and Inspired Call giving Tromell lots of survivability.
With your Commander as an enabler and tons of support, creatures that care about +1/+1 counters, like Evolution Witness, are at an absolute premium. Making mana to power your creatures out is surprisingly easy, too, with creatures like Gyre Sage, Kami of Whispered Hopes, and Topiary Lecturer.
After generating a ton of mana, Tromell can start fueling his Proliferate ability by playing lots of small creatures like Delighted Halfling or District Mascot. In addition to repurposing mana dorks in the late game, recursive creatures like Mistbreath Elder or Shigeki, Jukai Visionary can help set up a massive Proliferate turn with Tromell.
Once you have a massive Proliferate ability ready, ability doublers like Roaming Throne and Illusionist’s Bracers can help dump a ridiculous number of +1/+1 counters on your creatures. Alternatively, cards like Thousand-Year Elixir can untap Tromell, setting up multiple ability activations. From here, winning the game with Walking Ballista, or a sneaky Infectious Bite for a Poison kill, is trivial.
That said, you won’t always have your win conditions ready to go, and will be forced to instead swing in with big creatures. Fortunately, with Sphere Grid and Duskshell Crawler giving your creatures Trample, Tromell won’t be stopped by small chump blockers. Buffed-up creatures also unlock lots of powerful card draw options, like Spry and Mighty, Greater Good, or Rishkar’s Expertise.
Bringing Back Creatures Infinitely
Thanks to Tromell’s +1/+1 counter ability, he essentially breaks the Persist mechanic in half, easily creating a ton of infinite combos. With Altar of Dementia and Aerie Ouphes, for example, Tromell can mill out all of your opponents. After sacrificing the Ouphes to the Altar, they will come back with a -1/-1 counter, which Tromell’s ability neutralizes. This allows you to repeat the loop infinitely, winning with any sacrifice outlet.
On top of Persist Combos, Tromell also has a few infinite combos with cards that can untap creatures, like Sword of the Paruns and a mana generator like Cryptic Trilobite. So long as Tromell’s ability can Proliferate twice, you can add two +1/+1 counters to the Trilobite, generating four mana. This will be enough to allow Sword of the Paruns to untap Tromell, setting up infinite Proliferate activations.
Notably, this combo has a lot of variations attached, but they can be quite difficult to set up. If you can Proliferate three times in a turn, Staff of Domination and Cryptic Trilobite win the game by setting up an infinite mana, life, and draw loop. Trilobite can also be replaced for mana rocks like Pentad Prism which can generate infinite mana, but Tromell will have to Proliferate twice as many times per activation.
Try it For Yourself
Offering the perfect foundation for +1/+1 counter decks with infinites to boot, Tromell, Seymour’s Butler can make for an extremely strong Commander. Despite this, the card sees hardly any play in the command zone, with only 553 decks to his name. He does appear in the 99 much more, but at only 37,400 decks, Tromell still feels underplayed.
Thanks to these low play numbers, Tromell is extremely cheap to boot, worth less than $0.50 on TCGplayer. At this price, Tromell can make for an incredible budget Commander, alongside being a no-brainer in the 99 of your other counter decks.
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