Roalesk, Apex Hybrid
Two counter payoffs stapled to one legend, and the second is the one that actually matters. The enters trigger is the front-loaded half: land it, hand two +1/+1 counters to a creature you already control, and you have a five-mana flier that also pumped your board. That part is fine, if unremarkable. The death trigger points in a different direction. Proliferate, then proliferate again is not a value cushion for when your commander gets killed; it is a reward you build toward, a payload that scales with how much counter architecture you have already put on the table. Planeswalker loyalty, saga chapters, poison, charge counters on artifacts, +1/+1 counters across the whole battlefield: every one of them ticks up twice when this dies, and the trigger fires on any death, including a sacrifice whose timing you controlled. The tension is deliberate. A card that pays out best when it leaves play wants to be thrown away, so it pulls against the instinct to protect your creatures and toward setting up the board first and cashing the body in second. That inversion, where the on-death clause is the real engine and the 4/5 body is only the delivery vehicle, sets it apart from the counters-matter creatures that simply want to stay alive and keep growing.
