Last updated on December 12th, 2025 at 05:01 pm
MTG Life Counter App: Lotus – Card Game Review
MTG Life Counter App: Lotus is a Card/Utilities/Board game from Vanilla b.v., first launched in 6th February 2020.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 6,824+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes MTG Life Counter App: Lotus Stand Out
Lotus is your all-around Magic the Gathering Companion app.
Key features:
- Track life totals and Commander damage for up to 10 players
- Quick life total adjustments and custom starting health
- Card search with price checking and format legality
- Roll any custom dice (including D4-D20) or flip a coin
- High-roll feature and coin flips
- Track various counters: poison, experience, charge, storm, and more
- Support for partner commanders and Commander Tax
- Initiative and Monarch status tracking
- Game timer with individual turn tracking
- Customize player backgrounds and defeat messages
- Battery-friendly design with sleek dark mode
- Additional game modes: Planechase and Archenemy
The best MTG Life Tracker
We love Magic the Gathering! That's why we built Lotus. Supporting up to 10 players with custom starting health totals, Lotus makes tracking life totals as smooth as a well-oiled Mindslaver lock. Set unique colors or background images for every player, and swipe to track commander damage with ease. Beyond life tracking, Lotus handles everything from Poison counters to Storm count, Energy to Mana, and even keeps tabs on your Commander Tax.
Advanced Game Management
Swipe up or down on player cards to access a full suite of customization options. Set custom backgrounds, enable partner commanders, and manage players directly from their cards. Share your favorite profiles across devices, and when a player falls in battle, bring them back with our streamlined revival system. Plus, add some salt to defeat with customizable defeat messages!
Card Search and Price Checking
Need to check if that spicy tech is format legal? Or maybe you're wondering about the price of that chase rare? Search for any Magic card to instantly see current prices and format legality information.
Additional Game Modes: Planechase and Archenemy
Planechase: Journey through different planes with a full suite of Planechase cards, including the newest Doctor Who planes. The deck shuffles automatically, bringing fresh challenges to each game.
Archenemy: Unite against a common foe or take on the villain's role with integrated Archenemy Schemes, including the latest cards from Duskmourn: House of Horror.
Game Timer and Turn Tracking
Keep your games moving with our integrated game timer and turn tracker. Whether you're in a casual Commander game or racing against the clock in a tournament, Lotus helps ensure smooth gameplay without slow play.
Battery-friendly MTG Companion
The app is designed to be energy-efficient with a dark mode that conserves your battery during those epic Commander sessions. Plus, there are no ads, so you can focus on your game without distractions.
Free MTG Companion App
Lotus is completely free—no ads, no in-app purchases, and no hidden fees. Just enjoy a fully featured Magic the Gathering life counter and companion app built by players, for players.
We'd love your feedback!
If you have any feedback, please let us know! Your input helps us make Lotus even better and keeps it as your go-to Magic the Gathering life counter and companion app.
This app contains unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Fan Content Policy of Wizards of the Coast. This app is not approved or endorsed by Wizards. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. © Wizards of the Coast LLC.
This Card game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, MTG Life Counter App: Lotus is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 28th October 2025
Recent improvements include:
Another update is here. This one focuses on clarity, customization, and smoother gameplay:
- Low health warning: player cards can blink when life gets low. Toggle on or off
- Long press to manually set the starting player when the turn tracker is enabled
- New turn change overlay: shows the current turn number, for example Turn 2 or Turn 3, whenever the turn advances
- Turn tracker badge repositioned so it is not blocked by notches, dynamic island, or other screen cutouts
- New option to keep zero counters visible on player cards, useful for counters like radiation
Download & Availability
MTG Life Counter App: Lotus is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get MTG Life Counter App: Lotus on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
One of the best and most intuitive counters for any MTG game style you are playing! Our group loved to use the commander counter settings, load our backgrounds with the commanders we are using, even toggle to different game modes if we are waiting something crazy for our game. This app packs so much and is ready-to-go for old and new MTG players alike!! This app needs to live on your phone.
Epik app for cooaperative and competitibe gams. Supur ausom.
Love all the features. Theres counters for everything. Theres even a little monarch token you can drag to whichever player has the special hat.
Works as intended. We screenshare to a big screen, would be nice to have all life totals oriented the same way.
Everyone at our LGS uses this app, ez to use and customizable.
Fine if you have a good connection but for some reason it doesnt start if you have no internet connection. The only parts of this app that should require connectivity are the card and art search.
Our group used carbon for years until a friend insisted we try lotus. Its free and NO ADS huge A+. All the features it provides, for the price you cannot beat it.
Probably the only app Ive found for an MTG life counter that is both fully featured and visually appealing. We dont understand why this app is free.
Wow where to start, you can customize backgrounds to match your deck or play style. You can adjust the default settings for different game modes, commander damage is tracked and other tricky counters like poison as well. The best part is the ability to play all archenemy and planechase seemlessly within the app. How amazing, thanks for such a great app.
Doesnt get any better than this, absolutely no ads and the best layouts available.
There is so much customizability, and various features that add real flavor to the magic game. For example, the post mortem texts are hilarious and customizable. The software is somewhat hard to navigate due to the vast variety of features but its a great app! Also, there are some glitches with life total changes on the side closest to the camera, but often thats because our opponents are frustrated and dont click it right :). Keep rocking Lotus! 9/10, highly recommend.
This app needs to start tracking partner damage and it would be great! Also the Citys Blessing.
We love the quality, plus the lack of ads, that Lotus provides.
Simple and easy to use- very useful and nice.
Best app used for tracking, simple, yet with all features needed to play! Love it.
This life counter is just exceptional.
Very user friendly and has everything.
This app uses bright and vibrant colorsphone screens are prone to screen image burn like mines. Other wise it works.
We have an iPhone 13 and we dont use this app on full brightness, but when you close out of the app you can faintly see the middle icon.
Its more than just a life counter, its a whole game tracker. Great app with some user interface problems; the main issue for our group is that when you have the turn tracker on for a 4 player game the tracker button that you have to press to progress on is majorly blocked by the whole game timer.
A good life counter Buti no longer subtracts commander damage from you main life. So for our needs it becomes overly complicated.
Why is commanded damage combined? There needs to be a way to separate it for each player. Whats the point if it cant do that.
This app wishes it was Life Tap. The fact that additional screens take weird swipes are irritating, not being able to actively see commander damage is inconvenient.
In the pictures section on the app before you download it shows card pictures under the health like u can custom but only thing we found that changes pictures is the setting button, how do u change the picture for each player playing.
Ive tried several MTG Life counter apps, but this ones the best seems as the best UI and is pretty intuitive.
Our friends and we have taken to using Lotus exclusively. Such a wonderful piece of software. Thank you for making this.
If youre taking the time to read this, you are a smart person who likes to research things. Look no further than this review! We dont think that there is a single ad in the app. At least we havent found one yet. Lots of players makes counting lots of things super easy. You can put counters like XP, mana, and Poison counters on players. Funny death messages are displayed when a player is killed, which are fully customizable if you found them cheesy or wanted to do something else with this app. To top it off, that app feels relatively clean. Really good for iPads as well, large screens will make the app easier to use. Definitely would recommend for all your board and card game needs, especially for Magic the Gathering, but not only for it.
You can tell that the people who made this app love playing Magic The Gathering. Gosh, we used another app and it was constant advertisements and also opened other web pages. Clearly a money grab. This app thought of everything. We love it! Thank you for developing this awesome app. The least we could do was provide this review for how awesome the app is.
Love this app. Cant believe its free! The only MTG counter to have.
The best MtG app and it's not even close.
The app is amazing, it has so many features others dont have. We do have 1 thing we think it could have as an update. We have an iPhone 15 and it has the Dynamic Island little pill shaped thing for notifications. While in the app that thing blocks certain functions in the app. Can the app be shrunk just enough to not be interfered with by the Dynamic Island.
We had another counter app that for lack of a better word was buns. This app is way more functional. Easy to use. And love the customization.
We never rate apps, but this one is so dang good, its free, low data, great UI. We absolutely love it, best mtg app out there.
Its free. Has robust features. No ads. No Please buy Premium Edition notification. Great app.
The previous app allowed a two player setup with counters facing the same direction. The app auto updated and now its not an option. That makes it useless unless you are playing someone across a table.
App is phenomenal for a life counter, saving profiles for commanders, being able to use commanders pictures for the different players so on and so forth. We wish you could use alternate arts for commanders. Biggest issue is that too many inputs will crash it. If not for that, it would easily get 5 stars and be our go to life counter.
Tried all the other life trackers. This is the best one by far.
An extremely useful app with no adds and free 10/10.
We sent email feed back about adding a color picker, our email was answered next day and the color picker was added in a week. This app is quite literally the best health counter app in the app store by a long shot. Huge props to the devs for giving such a great resource to the community.
The recent update adding commander damage makes it so much easier than all the other apps Ive tried. Being able to update backgrounds gives every players commander a chance to shine whilst in battle. Its extremely simple to learn and use effectively. Bravo.
We love the new update, but whenever you reset the game, the font changes and no longer fits on the button. Fix this, its perfect.
The new UI is everything Ive been looking for in a life tracker app! The changes are very recent, so we have been experiencing a lot of crashes, but Im sure the issues will be patch soon.
The App Store claims this works on iOS 12 devices but does not work on our old air. It will work on modern iPads. A bit disappointing as functionality is simple enough to run on our potato of an iPad Air.
With the update to the new style, we feel like the developers have taken a nearly perfect life counter app, jammed it full of unneeded features, and have now made it borderline unusable. Its way more convoluted to set up for each pod especially if youre switching between multiple formats and life totals. The app also runs worse and somehow will crash mid game on us losing our life totals. Us and our pod have now switched to using spindown dice instead of an app because of this update. We wish we could roll it back.
Our dad is better than us at mtg but its fun anyways 5 stars.
Super good quality works well the added dice feature nice and it keeps track of everything and we dont have to search for the rule book that we lost 700 years ago the app works great.
Colors are beautiful, controls are simple and intuitive. Theres really nothing not to love about this app.
Us and our friend have been looking for a good life counter app for some time now and we love the whole idea of having card graphics as the backgrounds.
One of if not the best life counters available imo as it comes with a built in card searcher, a life tracker that keeps hold of your recent games and a full basic rule book of mtg its awesome and so far its worked perfectly fine with no issues its our favorite life counter for paper magic.
Lots of customization options for a life tracker. You can change player colors and track player counters (poison, energy etc.) simultaneously with regular life total. Can change number of players life totals being tracked so it can be used for just one person. Can change player name. Overall if you are on the App Store this is the BEST life tracker you can get. Period. :).
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 2.5.1
- Size: 3.90 MB
- iOS: 15.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Vanilla b.v.
Last updated: 28th October 2025 | Genre: Card, Utilities | Developer: Vanilla b.v.