Courage in Crisis

Proliferate lives or dies by what's already on the board, so the design's clever move is to seed the growth and spread it in the same resolution. Because the spell demands a creature to target, the +1/+1 counter it places first guarantees a live counter for the proliferate that follows: on a bare battlefield, the floor is two +1/+1 counters on that one creature, since the proliferate step immediately duplicates the tick it just placed. From there the effect fans outward across everything you're stacking: planeswalker loyalty, charge counters, poison markers, even the -1/-1 counters on an opposing creature you'd rather leave crippled. That self-contained sequence is the whole reason the card exists, since most proliferate effects assume you've already built the counter economy they feed. This one bootstraps that economy on the way in. The balancing cost is that two counters on a single creature is a modest return for a green sorcery at this rate, so the card wants a board already dense with counters to justify itself: superfriends shells, aggregate +1/+1 strategies, infect and toxic lines, any deck where one extra tick on many permanents compounds. Most proliferate payoffs are pure amplifiers dependent on setup; this one carries its own starter charge, generating the first counter it then multiplies. It reads narrow and plays wide, scaling from a small single-creature buff in a vacuum to a board-wide swing in the decks built to abuse it.