Vexing Radgull

The elegance here is that the combat trigger seeds its own engine. Rad counters function as a shared, upkeep-ticking clock: a player accrues them, then mills and loses life each turn based on how many they carry. Most cards that hand out rad counters simply add more; this one splits on a condition, planting the initial two when a player is clean and then converting to proliferate once the pile exists. That second mode is where the design earns its keep, because proliferate is agnostic about what it grows. A one-power flier is a feeble damage source in isolation, but it does not need to hit hard when every connection either starts a rad clock or advances every counter in play at once: the opponent's rads, your own +1/+1 counters, planeswalker loyalty, saga chapters, charge counters. The 1/2 body with evasion is deliberately small; the card is priced as a repeatable proliferate trigger that happens to fly, not as a threat in its own right. The catch is the connection requirement, and a 1/2 is trivially blocked, so the payoff is gated behind evasion and the opponent's willingness to leave the sky open. Snowball value comes from a board already stocked with counters, not from any single line meant to close the game.