Inexorable Tide

Proliferate arrived as a one-shot mechanic stapled to spells, but this turns it into an engine: every spell you cast, regardless of color or type, advances every counter you care about by one. That reframing is the whole point. Counters in this game are usually a side effect of the card that made them, paid for once and then static; here they compound. The design trick is that the trigger is cast-agnostic. It does not care what the spell does, only that it went on the stack, so the enchantment converts your normal game of playing cards into a slow ratchet on planeswalker loyalty, charge counters, +1/+1 counters, poison counters, and anything else already in play. The hidden cost is that it does nothing on an empty board: with no counters anywhere, proliferate is a blank trigger, so the card asks you to have already invested in something countable before it pays out. That dependency is why it reads as a build-around rather than a standalone threat. It rewards decks that were going to accumulate counters anyway (infect, planeswalker-heavy control, anything leaning on charge or experience counters) by turning their incidental spellcasting into acceleration. The five-mana price and the dead first turn are the brake on what would otherwise be a runaway feedback loop, and they are the reason the card lives in synergy decks rather than fair midrange.