Metastatic Evangel
Proliferate has always been the payoff at the end of a build, the last step that turns a board full of counters into an avalanche. This flips the sequence: instead of proliferating once and hoping the counters were there, it proliferates every time another nontoken creature joins the team, so the trigger fires on the same cadence a creature deck already operates at. That reframes what a counter can be worth. Any incidental +1/+1 counter, any loyalty, any charge counter on an artifact, any poison on an opponent grows with each body you deploy, and a creature deck deploys bodies as its default action. The nontoken clause is the balancing wire: it shuts the door on the obvious token-swarm engine that would turn a single anthem-maker into an infinite proliferate loop, and forces the value to come from real, nontoken creatures. The 3/1 is deliberately fragile, a rate that says this is an engine to protect rather than a beater to race with, and the small toughness makes it the first thing an opponent points removal at. What it opens up is broader than any single counter type: it is a proliferate outlet that scales with tempo rather than sitting idle until a critical mass arrives, which is a genuinely different place for the mechanic to live than the top-of-curve payoffs it usually attaches to.

