Expansion Algorithm

Proliferate has always been a one-shot verb: you pay for it once, it fires once, and its ceiling is dictated by the board you already have. This design breaks the single-fire assumption by making X the number of proliferate events rather than a magnitude. Each iteration still does exactly what proliferate always does (choose permanents and players that already have counters, add one more of each kind), so five passes over a twelve-permanent board is linear addition: sixty counters distributed, not some runaway multiplication. What changes is throughput. A player who would ordinarily proliferate a single time now buys as many of those distributions as they can pay for, which turns a modest incremental effect into a mana sink that empties a full board of counter engines at once. The double-blue commitment is the real constraint here, keeping repeatable proliferate out of the splash decks that would otherwise fold it into any counter-adjacent shell. And because proliferate can only add to counters that already exist, X converts to nothing until the board has something to grow; the card is worthless as an opener and lethal as a closer, rewarding a table that has already built a dense counter presence rather than one hoping to start one. Where earlier proliferate cards asked how many counters you have, this one asks how many times you want to distribute across them, and lets you scale that answer with the mana you have left.