Starting MTG player looking for some help

Hello everybody I just started playing Magic the Gathering just a few days ago and managed to create this deck that revolves around Hardened Scales after falling madly in love with it.

Current Decklist

Monsters

3x Aquastrand Spider
3x Augury Owl
2x Crowned Ceratok
2x Cytoplast Manipulator
2x Cytoplast Manipulator
2x Cytoplast Root-Kin
2x Fathom Mage
2x Plaxcaster Frogling
2x Plaxmanta
2x Vorel of the Hull Clade


Enchantments

4x Hardened Scales
2x Utopia Sprawl


Instants

3x Hunger of the Howlpack
3x Mana Leak
3x Solidarity of Heroes


Sorceries

2x Give // Take


Land

9x Forest
8x Island
3x Llanowar Reborn
3x Oran-Rief, the Vastwood


This deck revolves around generating +1/+1 counters and pumping it up with Hardened Scales, then doing stuff with the +1/+1 counters you got such as card draw, control, giving your minions trample, doubling the counters with Solidarity of Heroes, or a combination. But I feel that this deck lacks both consistency and a winning move or moves and in general this deck is countered heavily by control. After having tinkered with the deck through multiple sessions and being so frustrated on not getting to make the deck better I decided to come here for help and constructive criticism, and maybe to hear the truth that this deck may never work. I don't even know if I should even be messing with any sort of counter spells at all

As for "meta" I just play casual kitchen table, where control is heavily present.

What I would love the most is for this deck to actually work as I find it extremely fun to play, but I'm starting to lose hope in this ever being the least viable.

Any help is very much appreciated

Welcome to the forums, Hardcry. I'm going to be completely honest; I don't think this is really the right place for the discussion of this deck, as this forum tends to focus more on developing competitive/tournament decks. That said, I will offer some suggestions.

Hardened Scales is a potentially viable card in Modern. I, personally, would stick to a mono green list. Just keep your curve low and try to play an aggressive game. You mention that you've had trouble with consistency, which is likely do to the fact that you're not running x4 copies of anything other than Scales; find the best cards for your strategy and run as many copies as possible.

Here are some cards to consider:

Servant of the Scale
Skarrgan Pit-Skulk
Avatar of the Resolute
Scavenging Ooze
Strangleroot Geist
Managorger Hydra
Predator Ooze
Hangarback Walker
Inspiring Call


You also want to think about how your ideal opening turns will play out. You'll want to play Hardened Scales as early as possible, but it doesn't contribute anything to your board presence in and of itself. As such, you may want to run some turn 1 mana accelerators like Llanowar Elves or Elvish Mystic. That enables the line of turn 1 mana elf, into three 1-drops turn 2 (Scale + Scales + Servant, for example) or just ramping into a 3 drop. Inspiring Call is sort of your "payoff" card for this strategy.

Thank you very much, sorry if I posted incorrectly