Thirsting Roots

The clever thing here is that neither mode charges you a premium for the other. A one-mana basic-land tutor to hand is a rate players have accepted since Lay of the Land: that half alone justifies the card as fixing. Stapling proliferate to the same slot means the turn-one mana smoother becomes, several turns later, a way to advance a board full of counters instead. That is the payoff of the modal structure: you never draw a dead copy, because the fixing half is always live early and the proliferate half is always live late. Proliferate rewards a deck already invested in things that stack (loyalty, +1/+1s, poison, charge counters), so the choose-one framing lets a green ramp shell treat this as pure fixing while a synergy shell treats it as an engine piece, from the same printing. What keeps it modest is the sorcery speed and the single choice: you get one mode per cast, not both, which makes this a value smoother rather than a standalone payoff. The design belongs to a small family of green one-drops that hedge a utility effect against a synergy effect and let the builder decide at cast time which deck the card is playing for.