Solemnity

Counters are load-bearing across the modern game in a way they were not when this kind of static lock first appeared: +1/+1 counters on a growing fraction of creatures, charge counters on artifacts, the design world's ongoing romance with proliferate. This shuts all of it off symmetrically, on the battlefield and on players alike, by preventing counters from ever being placed in the first place. Note the exact scope: it lists artifacts, creatures, enchantments, and lands, so planeswalkers still gain loyalty normally, and because it stops counters from being put on, not removed, it does nothing to permanents that already carry counters or to cards counting down in exile. The sharper half of the design is what it does to permanents that depend on counters to function, and the outcomes split by wording. Persist creatures return forever, because the would-be -1/-1 counter never lands. Fading permanents fail their upkeep trigger and hit the graveyard, since their sacrifice fires when they can't remove a counter. Vanishing, by contrast, quietly survives: its sacrifice condition triggers only when the last time counter is removed, and a permanent that enters with none never satisfies it, so it sits on the battlefield indefinitely. That split is the engine's real texture: one line of text that wrecks a counters-matters opponent, disarms your own persist drawbacks, buries fading permanents, and hands vanishing ones a permanent lease. The price is the symmetry and the fragility. It blanks your own +1/+1 plan just as completely, and it is a bodyless enchantment, so a single disenchant collapses whatever board state it was holding together. Few static effects swing this far between irrelevant and indispensable, and the gap tracks exactly how much of the game now runs on counters.