Gitaxian Anatomist

Counter-based decks have always wanted a way to grow their board every turn, and the recurring problem with putting that effect on a creature is that a body which merely arrives and proliferates is fragile, replaceable, and outclassed by an instant that does the same thing without dying to a shock. The answer here is to make the body the reason you keep the card around after the trigger resolves: a 2/5 wall that shrugs off most early aggression and stands guard over a battlefield of counters long after the enters ability has fired. The self-tap clause is the elegant part of the design. Proliferation is gated behind tapping the creature itself, so entry becomes a real decision between feeding your counter engines and keeping a blocker upright the turn it lands. Because the effect is stapled to a permanent rather than spent as a one-shot spell, the trigger becomes reusable: a blink or bounce effect refires it, and a graveyard recursion piece returns the surgeon to proliferate again. That is where a creature-based version pulls ahead of its instant-speed cousins, not through any activated ability of its own, but through the machinery a permanent invites around it. The self-tap also reads as flavor made mechanical, a Phyrexian surgeon leaning into its work, but the payload is plain: an effect historically tucked onto sorceries and single triggers now comes with a wall sturdy enough to keep showing up and be reset again.