Radiation in MTG Fallout – Rad Counters and keywords explained

Magic: The Gathering’s Universes Beyond product line has brought the world of Fallout into the game. Many creatures, mechanics, and locations have been translated into Magic cards and released as four pre-constructed Commander decks meant to be playable right out of the box. One of these mechanics is radiation, something that is very important to deal with in Fallout. Radiation has been converted into Magic in the form of rad counters. This guide will go over everything you need to know about the mechanic and how it works. This is Magic: The Gathering Fallout’s radiation mechanic explained. 

How Radiation Works in Magic: The Gathering

Radiation can only be caused by gaining rad counters. Some cards will force them on you or your opponent, while others will only affect your opponent. Rad counters are not something you want to have (in most cases, anyway), and are detrimental. 

For each rad counter you have, at the beginning of your precombat main phase, you have to mill that many cards. For each nonland card you milled, you lose one life and a rad counter. This is the only way to actually remove a rad counter, with no other effect able to get them off of you once they’re on. 

So long as you have at least one rad counter, you will have to mill cards. It is possible to completely whiff and only mill land counters. In this case, you won’t lose any life, but you won’t lose any rad counters either.

✓ Johnny’s Tip:

Using Rad Counters To Your Advantage:

Rad counters are meant to not be positive, however, if you are playing a deck that actively wants cards in your graveyard, getting rad counters can be a good thing. It’s a way to give you consistent free mill to set up your graveyard to use your effects on.

Since rad counters are counters, cards that proliferate can give more of them without needing to use effects that give rad counters specifically. Proliferating has been around for far longer than rad counters, and as such, has many more support cards. Combining proliferating with rad counters is a great combo, as it makes them much more dangerous and harder to get rid of. If you are taking on the task of trying to win a Commander game by milling your opponents, rad counters are a great way to make the task easier. 

Radiation itself doesn’t create any kind of token and is more like an emblem. Instead, they are rad counters that are put onto you as a player. While there are no ways to actually remove counters from yourself once they’re there, you can prevent the counter from being put on you in the first place. This can be done traditionally with counterspells or spells that counter abilities, but a more static way to do it is with the card Solemnity. Solemnity prevents counters from being put on players at all and shuts radiation down in its tracks before it ever even gets the chance to start affecting anyone.

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That’s as much as we have on how Rad counters work in MTG Fallout. In the meantime, you might want to check out the Science! decklist, which covers everything you need to know about one of Magic’s latest preconstructed decks.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do Rad counters work in MTG?

‘Radiation’ is applied through Rad counters, which stack on affected players. Once a player receives a Rad counter, at the start of each pre-combat phase, they’re going to need to mill X amount of cards, where X is the number of Rad counters applied.