Proliferate is a unique and strategic keyword action in the card game Magic: The Gathering, allowing players to significantly amplify the effects of various counters already in play. Essentially, when you proliferate, you get to boost existing counters on permanents and players, making them more powerful or bringing them closer to a specific threshold.
Understanding the Proliferate Process
The mechanic works in a precise sequence, giving you control over which counters grow:
- Identify Targets: You look at all permanents on the battlefield and all players in the game.
- Choose Existing Counters: From these permanents and players, you may choose any number of them that already have at least one counter on them. You are not forced to choose anything, but you can pick as many as you like.
- Add More Counters: For each permanent or player you chose, they receive one additional counter of each kind they already have. This means if a permanent has multiple types of counters, each type gets an extra one.
Key Characteristics of Proliferate:
- Choice is Optional: You don't have to choose any permanent or player if you don't want to.
- Any Number of Targets: You can select from zero up to every single permanent or player that has at least one counter.
- Adds Existing Types Only: Proliferate only adds counters that are already present. It cannot introduce a new type of counter to a permanent or player. For instance, if a creature only has +1/+1 counters, you can't use proliferate to give it a charge counter; it will only gain another +1/+1 counter.
- Versatile Application: It affects all kinds of counters, including:
- +1/+1 counters: Making creatures larger.
- -1/-1 counters: Weakening opposing creatures.
- Loyalty counters: Accelerating planeswalker abilities.
- Charge counters: Powering up artifacts.
- Poison counters: Bringing opponents closer to defeat.
- And many other unique counter types.
Practical Examples of Proliferate
To illustrate how proliferate functions, consider these common scenarios:
- Growing Creatures:
- Imagine you control a creature with three +1/+1 counters on it. When you proliferate, you can choose that creature, and it will gain an additional +1/+1 counter, becoming a 4/4 if it was originally a 1/1.
- If your opponent controls a creature with two -1/-1 counters, you can choose their creature to proliferate. It will then gain another -1/-1 counter, further weakening it.
- Accelerating Planeswalkers:
- Your Jace, the Mind Sculptor has 4 loyalty counters. If you proliferate and choose Jace, he will gain one more loyalty counter, reaching 5 loyalty, getting him closer to his ultimate ability.
- Boosting Artifacts:
- An artifact like Everflowing Chalice has 2 charge counters. When you proliferate, you can add another charge counter, increasing the amount of mana it can produce.
- Inflicting Poison:
- An opponent has 5 poison counters. If you proliferate and choose that opponent, they will gain another poison counter, bringing their total to 6. This is crucial as 10 poison counters typically result in a loss.
Proliferate in Two-Headed Giant
In the popular multiplayer format, Two-Headed Giant, there's a specific interaction for poison counters:
- Shared Poison: In a Two-Headed Giant game, poison counters are shared by the entire team, not tracked individually for each player. If you choose either player on an opposing team to proliferate poison, the team's shared poison counter total will increase.
Proliferate is a powerful mechanic that rewards players for building strategies around counters, allowing them to scale their board presence and hasten their win conditions.
