Agent Frank Horrigan
Proliferate has spent most of its life as a support mechanic: a way to nudge planeswalker loyalty one tick, thicken a poison total, or bump a stray +1/+1 counter. Bolting it to an 8/6 with trample converts that support into a payload. It fires both on entry and on attack, and twice each time, so the body is really an engine that also happens to hit for eight. What holds the whole thing together is the conditional indestructible, which lasts only while it has attacked this turn. Send it in and blocking accomplishes nothing but chump; hold it back and you are defending with an ordinary 6-toughness creature. That is the standing wager: you get a nearly unkillable attacker precisely when you commit it to combat, and a fragile one the moment you flinch. The proliferate scales to whatever counter-based board you have assembled around it: charge counters, oil, energy, poison, other creatures ticking up on their own increments. It does not build the synergy; it compounds whatever you brought. A legendary Mutant Warrior stapled to a repeatable, attack-triggered double proliferate belongs at the top end of a deck that treats counters as a resource to snowball rather than a bonus to accumulate.
