App Comparison
Lifetap is a free, ad-free counter with the deepest counter set in this category (energy, monarch, initiative, city's blessing on top of the poison and Commander damage both apps track) plus Planechase and Archenemy support. TurnZero HQ covers fewer of the fringe counters but is a different kind of app: a social layer over the whole night, with Moments, live standings across every pod, Elo-style deck MMR, and an AI recap when it's over. Different priorities: single-game depth vs. whole-night memory.
Best for playgroups who track a whole night, not just one game
TurnZero HQ handles life totals with a tap or a drag, and keeps Commander damage separate from life loss, broken out by attacker, so lethal damage never sneaks up on anyone. Beyond the table it stops being a counter: a join code brings the whole playgroup into one night that guests can join without an account, the room splits into as many pods as it needs with a single standings race across all of them, and Moments turn the big plays into a shared feed: a photo, a note, or the exact cards involved, tagged to the turn, with reactions and comments from anyone in the group, including friends following the night live from home. Each deck earns an Elo-style MMR from real results, globally and inside your playgroup, and AI recaps close out each game and the night as a whole. It supports 1v1, FFA up to six players, and Two-Headed Giant, runs on iOS, Android, and web, and is free with a premium tier for the AI extras. It's Commander-first, with Draft support expanding.
Best for the deepest single-game counter set
Lifetap is a free, ad-free counter with no account required, built for up to six players plus Three-Headed Giant. It tracks Commander damage including partner commanders, and covers a wide range of counters: poison, energy, experience, monarch, initiative, and city's blessing, all of which most trackers here leave out. It supports Planechase, Archenemy, and Bounty formats, lets you set custom playmats or card art per player, has a webcam mode, and is translated into 12 languages. It tracks turn-by-turn history within a game, and recent updates have reportedly added searchable history with per-deck win rates.
Lifetap covers formats and counters TurnZero HQ doesn't touch. If your table plays Planechase or Archenemy some nights, or if your Commander games regularly involve energy, monarch, initiative, or city's blessing, Lifetap tracks all of it natively where TurnZero HQ doesn't. (Poison is the exception, since both apps track it.) Partner commander damage is also handled specifically. On top of that, Lifetap is free with no account required, works offline-friendly out of the box, and lets you set a player's background from Magic card art specifically, where TurnZero HQ lets you upload your own image instead. Lifetap's webcam mode has no TurnZero HQ equivalent, and if your group plays in more than one language, its 12 translations are a real advantage TurnZero HQ can't match.
TurnZero HQ's whole design starts from a different question: not "how do we track this game," but "what happened this whole night, and who gets to relive it." Join-code gatherings mean a playgroup shows up to one shared night instead of separate single-game sessions, guests included, and when there are more players than seats the room splits into pods that play simultaneously, balanced automatically, reshuffled between rounds, all feeding one standings race. TV mode puts that on a screen for the room, and anyone who couldn't make it can open the app from anywhere and watch life totals move in real time.
The social layer is the part a counter can't reach. Moments let any player post a photo, a note, or the exact cards behind a big play, tagged to the turn it happened, with reactions and comments from the whole group. AI recaps close out each game and the night in one of five voices, from straight play-by-play to an outright roast, and land in that same feed. Decks earn an Elo-style MMR from actual results, globally and within your playgroup, so "which of my decks is good" has a real answer, and Rate My Deck scores a list against the official Commander brackets before it's been played. Night History keeps every past gathering on record. Lifetap's recent searchable history is a step toward the stats half of this, but it doesn't connect multiple games into one continuous night the way TurnZero HQ does, and it doesn't try to hold the story at all.
None of that requires the whole table to be on board, either. Personal Mode runs the full tracker (life, damage dealt to each opponent, a turn timer, Moments) scoped to just your side, so you still get a real record when the rest of the pod is using a spindown. Board State turns a once-a-round photo of the battlefield into a confirmed, AI-matched list of what was actually in play, round by round, which is how you find out which cards are genuinely winning you games rather than which ones feel like they do. And TurnZero HQ's MCP server exposes your decks and game history to Claude and other AI assistants, so tuning a list against real results is a question you can just ask.
Three more differences are worth naming, since Lifetap is otherwise the deeper app at the table. Decks are built inside TurnZero HQ, and the card scanner adds them from your camera, one card or a whole stack in a single shot, rather than by typing names. Rulings settles a rules argument mid-game with a judge-style outcome, an explanation, and cited comprehensive-rules sections, and saves it so the same interaction doesn't come up cold again; Lifetap tracks the counters for an interaction but doesn't adjudicate it. And TV mode drives a shared display for the room: live life totals, standings, and table assignments on a living-room screen or a store's wall, which is the difference between an app on four phones and a night the whole room can watch. When a store is running a real event rather than a casual night, tournament mode adds Swiss-style pairing, rounds, and standings.
One more that matters if you tinker: decks keep a version history. Every edit snapshots the list, each game is tagged with the version actually played, and results split per version, so when you swap eight cards and the deck starts winning, you can see whether that's true or whether you just got a good draw for a month. Lifetap's per-deck win rates don't distinguish between the list you played in March and the one you play now.
If your table plays Planechase or Archenemy, leans on monarch or the other fringe counters, or just wants the fastest, most feature-complete single-game counter with no account and no ads, use Lifetap. It's genuinely built for that. If your group has a standing Commander night, plays multiple games in a sitting, fills more than one table, or wants the night itself kept (who's winning, which deck's MMR says it's carrying the group, and the highlights somewhere better than a group chat), TurnZero HQ is built specifically for that gap, and Lifetap doesn't try to fill it. Plenty of players could reasonably use both depending on the night.
Yes. Lifetap is free, has no ads, and doesn't require an account to use. It's available on iOS and Android.
Poison, yes, alongside life totals and Commander damage broken out by attacker. What TurnZero HQ doesn't have is the rest of Lifetap's counter set: energy, monarch, initiative, and city's blessing. If your table leans on those every game, Lifetap covers more ground there.
Not natively. Lifetap tracks turn-by-turn history within a single game, and recent updates have reportedly added searchable history with per-deck win rates, so it's worth checking the current app version for details. But it doesn't connect multiple games in one sitting into live standings the way TurnZero HQ does, doesn't run several pods at once under one race, and doesn't carry stats forward across nights.
A Moment is a post in your night's shared feed: a photo, a note, or the exact cards behind a big play, tagged to the turn it happened. Anyone in the gathering reacts and comments, including friends following the night remotely, and the AI recaps blend into the same feed, so the story of the night gets captured without anyone writing it up afterwards. Lifetap has no equivalent; it's a counter, not a social app.
Lifetap. TurnZero HQ is built around Commander (with Draft support expanding beyond it) and doesn't support Planechase, Archenemy, or Bounty variants. If those formats are part of your regular rotation, Lifetap is the better fit for those nights.
Commander damage by attacker, Moments, deck MMR, and an AI recap when you're done. Free to start.
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