Contentious Plan

Proliferate has a floor problem: the mechanic is potent when there are counters to grow, but a proliferate spell that finds nothing to advance is a dead card in hand. The template solution here is to bolt the effect onto a cantrip, so the spell always has a job. Draw a card is the safety valve: whether or not you have a planeswalker's loyalty, an infect creature, a +1/+1 counter, or a poison total worth pushing, the card never sits idle. That turns proliferate from a build-around into a role-player, a two-mana sorcery that replaces itself and adds a counter of each kind already present when the board supports it. The design logic is old: give a marginal effect a cantrip and it becomes playable in far more decks, because the worst case is simply a standard two-mana cantrip. What separates this from pure filler is proliferate's reach. It does not check counter type, so a single cast can push loyalty toward an ultimate, advance a saga's chapter, thicken a wall of +1/+1 counters, and tick up a charge-counter engine, all at once and across multiple permanents (and players' poison totals). The card asks nothing except a blue mana and the willingness to run a cantrip; the proliferate is a rider you cash in whenever the game state has counters worth compounding. Stapling card draw to a conditional effect removes the downside without capping the upside, which is the whole appeal of the template.