Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1286: Proliferate

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

This podcast talks about the history of the proliferate mechanic.

I'm pulling out my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work. Okay, so today it's all about the proliferate mechanic. One of the all-time favorite mechanics that I've ever been involved in making. I'm a huge fan of proliferate. So we're going to talk about proliferate. We're going to talk about where it came from and it's evolution.

It's been in a bunch of sets. And today, today's Poliferate story. Okay, first and foremost, what is Poliferate? those that might not know the mechanic. So it's a keyword action, sort of a verb that does something. And what it says is, for every player and permanent on the battlefield that has a counter on it, you may choose to put another copy of that counter. So for example, if a player has a counter, say a poison counter, you may choose to give them another poison counter. If a permanent has a plus one plus one counter or an oil counter or a minus one minus one counter,

you may choose to give an additional counter. If a permanent or player has more than one type of counter, you may choose to give them each of one of those types of counters. So if a creature has a plus one plus one and a oil counter on it, you can give it an additional plus one plus one and additional oil counter, for example. You are not obligated to give anybody a counter. If you have a poison counter and you wish not to have another poison counter, you can avoid giving yourself another poison counter.

And you can pick and choose which permanence you want to give a counter and which permanence you do not want to give a counter. You are not obligated to do that. And as far as players go or permanence go, you can choose any player, any permanent. The only rule is it must have a counter on it. You cannot, in order to proliferate, you are making additional counters for a counter that exists.

you can't make a counter that doesn't exist and you can't change the counter you can only make one more of an existing counter and like I said you don't have to do you can choose not to do that and players can respond to you doing it so they could sack a creature that has a counter they can do

something in response to you doing that and then you would have put an encounter on it in a two-headed giant game if the team has a poison counter you can give the totality of the whole team one more poison counter Okay, where exactly did this mechanic come from? The proliferate goes back to the set Scars of Mirrodin.

So a little history on the Forexians. The Forexians were a villain that first showed up in Antiquities. Antiquities was kind of, it's the second ever magic expansion. The first one with an original story to it. Obviously, Rabid Knights is telling me the story of 1,0001 Arabian Nights. But the Brothers War I mean, Antiquities doesn't exactly tell the whole story but it hints at the story

and gives you pieces of the story and for the very first time you learn of the Forexians that play a role in the Brothers War. The Frexians would then show up again being the major villain of the Weatherlight saga of which they were dispatched

they were destroyed They were eradicated on every plane of the multiverse. So clearly we were done with them. But we weren't done with them. Brady Domirith and I, Brady was in charge with the creative team at the time.

We were both big fans of the Frexians. They're my favorite magic villains. So we hatched the plan. And the plan was in original Mirrodin, we hinted basically Karn unwillingly brought some Frexian oil when he made the plane of

Myriden, and it was infected, but very subtly infected, and we hinted at that. In fact, in the novel for Myriden, the main bad guy, like, rub some oil and it goes into his fingers. Like, we don't talk much about it, but it corrupts him, it corrupts Mirdin. So we knew the plan was we were going to come back, and we were going to show that Frexian had corrupted Mirdin. So for those that know the story, or I'll tell the story, the original plan was the fall set was going to to be new phorexia. And we were going to come, we're like, oh, remember old's ferexia that got destroyed and, you know, invasion block with the end of the, end of the weddlet saga? Well, there's a different phrexia, a new ferexia. But we weren't going to tell you exactly

where they were from. And the idea was that the end of the block, sort of inspired by like the final scene, spoiler here, but the final scene in Planet of the Apes when he sees the Statue of Liberty. He realizes he's on Earth. I'm sorry, if I, ruined a movie that's from the 60s. But anyway, the idea was in the last set, you'd realize that this new phrexia is actually Miriden.

Oh my goodness. But we realized while making the fall set that we were kind of not telling the interesting story, meaning the fall of Mirren to the Frexians was a cool story. So what we ended up doing was the Frexians show up in Scars of

Mirren. I think they're on 10% of the car. There's a watermark. Then, in the middle set, Mirdin besieged, they're 50%. And then there's a giant war. And then we say to the audience, we don't know the outcome. Depending on the outcome, either of the set's going to, the Mirdin's win, it's going to be Mirdin pure, the third set. But the Phrexians win, it'll be new phrexia.

And then obviously it was new phrexia, because the Frexians won. And the idea was we were sort of, we wanted to put our, we wanted the Frexians to come back strong and make a statement of, we came, to one of the most powerful planes and even they couldn't resist us. And the idea was that the Frexians were stuck. They didn't have a means to travel between planes.

So while they dominated on Myriden, now New Phrexia, they were stuck there. Obviously that would become a big storyline for the Frexian arc later on. We'll get to that today. Okay, so we were making Scars of Miriden. And the idea, the real idea of the block was

we wanted to reintroduce the Frexians as villains. So one of the things I was really interested in was trying to give a definition to the Frexians, a mechanical definition. There's a few things they had done before. They'd mostly been only on black cards. They were tied to artifacts. But there wasn't a lot, like, the mechanical definition of the Frexians was slight. And so we did a bunch of things. One, we wanted to brought them out to all five colors. But I was really interested in figuring out how do we represent the Frexians. And so the idea that we landed on that I was very excited by was.

the idea of phrexians as a disease, that essentially they were spreading their disease throughout the multiverse, and like a disease, diseases just keep spreading themselves, that that's what diseases do, that the phrexians were just like this force of nature that just was slowly taking over, you know, they were just spreading, that's what they did. And the idea that I liked about the disease metaphor was, I think we came up with four adjectives to describe the phrexians. See if I can remember my four adjectives. They were toxic. They were viral. They were relentless and they were adaptive. I think it's the fourth one. So the idea is that they're hard to stop because they just keep coming. So I was really enamored by the idea

of phrexian as disease. And so I made a card. So the card I made, oh, so part of showing that the phorexians were this sort of harsh form, we came up with an ability we called infect. So, in fact, one of the ideas that I was really excited by was tying poison to phrexia. Oh, they're a disease. Well, we had this mechanic called poison that I had been trying to get back in the game forever. And poison does a thing where it's an alternate wind condition. If you give players poison, if they get 10 poison counters, they lose the game. And we don't give you a way to get, other than an obscure Homeland's card.

We don't give you a way to get rid of poison. So the idea is once you get poison, you just get closer and closer to death. And I thought poison was a really cool fit for the phrexians. And then when we were making phrexia, there was a mechanic that we had done in Shadamore called Wither. And the way Wither worked is all damage was done in the form of a minus one, minus one counter. And that felt very diseasedy. So originally we were going to do wither in, to represent the phraxians. But then we realized we came up with the idea of infect.

So what infect was, it was kind of wither plus poisonous, sort of. So the idea is you do all your damage to creatures in the form of minus one minus one counters and to players in the form of poison counters. It was really cool. Ended up being a little strong, but it was very cool. So infect was a major part of the set, which meant minus one, minus one counters, and poison counters were a big part of the set. I guess that's important before I get to my card.

So, anyway, I made a card. I forget what I called it. But the idea was I wanted to represent that, you know, the Frexians were a disease. So I made a card that said, for every creature that has a minus one, minus one counter, put another minus one counter on it. And for every player that is that as a poison counter, put another poison counter on them. So the idea is it spreads, right? If the minus one, minus one counters and the poison counters represent the disease,

aha, I spread the disease. And so I made that as just a single card. But we were playing and played. I think I made it, I'm not sure whether there was a rare or uncommon. But it's pretty cool. So I ended up making it a vertical cycle. I really liked it. I thought it was a really cool card.

And then I think I decided that just to make it play a little better, that I let you, the person playing the card, decide who got the counters. if you and your, because originally the original version, it just affected anything. If your creatures had minus one minus one counters, you got the counters. If you had poison, you got the counters.

And what I realized was that it was fun, but if I made you affect yourself, you just played it a lot less. Because in scars of mirroden, there's poison going around. So eventually what I said is, okay, what if I let you choose? You control what disease

spreads. So the change was, okay, for each creature with a minus one, minus one counter or a player with a poison counter, you may choose. So if you had a poison counter, you don't have to give yourself an extra poison counter, but you can give one to your opponent.

And you don't have to give your creatures more minus one encounter, but you can give them to your opponent's creatures. So that was very exciting. And so I, like I said, I made it into a vertical cycle. And at one point, I liked it so much, I'm like, well, maybe we want more than a vertical cycle. Maybe we should make this a mechanic. It just felt so, it just, the flavor of it was so strong to me,

especially in the world of minus one, minus one counters and poison counters. So, at one point, so I'm thinking about making a mechanic. I think I actually made it into a mechanic. And then one of the members of my team got named Mark Lobis, he said to me, well, this affects minus one, minus one counters and poison counters, but could it affect other counters? I'm like, what do you mean? He goes, well, magic has other counters.

It, you know, what if we just let you affect any counter? And I was like, that is an amazing idea. I was very, very focused on it as like representing disease. That's why I was thinking poison and minus one, minus one. But the set also, so one of the things we had done in the set, because there were poison counters in the set, I had also, just like to parallel, because Mirdin was. an artifact of that, that we had done a bunch of, like, charge counters. Original Mirrodin had judged charge counters.

So I was bringing that back to feel like Mirrodin. So we did, in fact, have counters on cards that weren't minus one, minus one, or poison counters. And I'm like, oh, it's kind of cool that if I'm playing a Forexian deck, oh, I can use it to, like, inflame the disease. But if I'm playing a Mirrenan deck, maybe I'm just pumping up my own things to give them more uses and stuff like that. And that felt really cool.

And I like the idea of just it made it more generally useful. Like one of the things we're always thinking about is backward compatibility. I mean, now, Poison existed before Scars and Mirrodin, but not on a lot of cards. Maybe in all of magic before Scars and Mirren, it had been on, I don't know, 10, 15 cards. Like, it appeared, Poison first appeared in Legends on two cards, and then it showed up sporadically. Like, Mirage had a card.

And, like, they would show up every once in a while. We tried to do a big push in Tempest to do a big poison set, and Arnie decided not only to take poison out of Tempest, but just take it out of the game. I then tried to put poison into Unglue 2, which always on vegetables, was the joke. But anyway, Unglue 2 didn't happen. Then when we made FutureSight,

I made two cards on the Future Shifter Cheat, two or three cards, have poison on them. And so I was hinting it, poisonous, like, oh, poison's coming back. So, there was a little bit, and minus one, minus one encounters did pre-exist scars in Meriden.

Like, for example, a Shadamore had used minus one, minus one counters, because of wither. So the idea was, there was some background compatibility, but maybe in any counter was just exciting. Now, you could buff your plus one plus one counters. You could buff, you know, you could, it just made it much more open-ended. And one of the things

in general that we like is you want to be more open-ended. I like when making mechanics, you know, hey, in this set here, it's doing this thing, but it would be kind of need if it did other things than other sets. And so we decided we'd make it very open-ended. Okay, so what happened was we put it into Scars and Meriden. Originally, in the original Scars of Meriden, we just put it on blue and artifact cards. And the idea being that proliferate, was best in a blue. Blue was the color that was most about, we thought, extrapolating and like adding token counters. It just felt, it felt flavorfully right. We would then later put it

in Mirren Besiege, we put it in black and green. And now we sort of feel like blue, black, and green are the proliferate colors when we do proliferate. And then we, in Newfraxia, we did more in blue, black, and red, but we did one in red. Red is not really a proliferate color, but we did do one in red. Okay, so that was, so we did it in Scars and Mirrodin, and it was quite exciting. Okay, so it came out, players really liked it. It was very popular. In fact, it was one of the, I think in effect, rated slightly higher than it,

but it was like the number two rated mechanic, I think, in Scars of Mirridon. So anyway, it was highly liked. People really, really enjoyed it. So we wanted to bring it back. It felt like a cool mechanic to bring back. So when we were making Caladesh, so Caledash was an artifact set. It had sort of a, it was sort of like an inventor set with the flavor, with quirky artifacts. But we both had mechanical fabricate that put plus one plus one counters on creatures or you can make tokens.

And it just, as a general rule, had a lot of plus one and plus one counters in it, partly because fabricate exists. It probably because one of the things we did is when we wanted to represent it. present people using technology, plus one, plus one counters, oh, because I have technology, I'm stronger than the technology. So a lot of the ways we were showing invention was it was through plus one plus one counters. It was one the ways we showed it. So we wanted to bring it back. So we're going to put it in in Kaladesh.

The problem we ran into was because it turns out that proliferating plus one plus one counters is stronger than minus one, minus one in poison. Poison, you need 10 to lose. And so, you know, oh, the reason, by the way, the other thing we liked about proliferate in the original scars that mirroden was it added in its other flavor to poisoning. Because the idea was I could just poison someone out. Or if I could get just one poison counter on them in a blue deck,

I could proliferate them to death, meaning I could play this control strategy where it wasn't that I did a lot of poison to you. I got one through and then I could fan it with proliferate over time. Then it ended up being really interesting. But anyway, So it turned out in a set with a lot of plus one plus one counters. Polyphrate was just a little bit too strong.

And so we ended up pulling back. Like we thought about it. It was actually in the set for a while, but it ended up, it just, in order to balance it, we had to make the proliferate card so weak because it was so powerful with plus and plus one counters. And it was a set that had a lot of plus one plus one counters. We then considered again in Ether Revolt. Even though we said no, we said no in Kaladesh.

it seemed so synergistic we tried to get an A3rd Revolt a set later and ended up with the same place of okay, it's too good there's no way to do it without causing...

We really, really had to weaken it because it was so good with the plus and plus encounters. Then, in Ravnika Allegiance, that was our third trip to Ravnika, we tried it as the simic mechanic. And what it turned out there,

was it just one of the things that you need in a guild mechanic is they have to blend properly with the things

around it and while Simic was making counters there wasn't enough counters around it so it runs in a problem

where people playing Simic want these cards but other people don't and so they always go to the people playing Simic

and so it gets overpowered and it creates a lot of repetition of play means oh if you're playing Simic

you always have access to proliferate and so we ended up pulling up because it just didn't quite fit. But the third time we tried it was the charm.

War of the Spark. So War of the Spark was the big conclusion to the Bullets arc, where Bullis is trying to steal all the sparks of all the Plainswalkers, or many of the Plainswalkers, from the Mold War II. So he makes this army,

this eternal zombie army, and he draws all the Plainswalkers are not all, but many of the Plainswalkers to Rabnika and trapped them there and there's a giant war. But anyway, so the set ended up having this phrex, not forrexian, this plainswalker theme.

We had 36 planeswalkers. Most sets at the time had two to three planeswalkers. So it was a lot of planeswalkers. Plainswalkers used loyalty counters. So, and the main mechanically used plus one plus one counters was a mass. So a mass, we were

trying to represent the zombie eternals. So instead of having lots of individual counters, it generated one army token, and then if you already had the army token, instead of making a new one, it just put the counters on that. So the army token kept getting bigger rather than making lots of zombies. So proliferate worked well with that because it made the zombie army one bigger, but it didn't like, it didn't boost lots and lots of things, that the plus and plus and plus counters are more concentrated to a mass. So because you had plains walkers and a mass,

it actually was the right mix, and proliferate was a really cool mechanic. Now the neat thing about proliferate is, remember, the first time was in Scars of Mirridon. The main counters were minus one, minus one, and poison, and a little bit of charge counters. In war of the spark, the main counters were loyalty counters and plus one plus one on the mass mechanic. So while proliferate was in both sets, it just played really differently. And that's one of the fun things about the mechanic is it really has a lot of flexibility. So it's really dependent on the things around it.

And that is one of the things I enjoy most about proliferate is it just, it is a really open-ended mechanic that does cool things that you really can figure out what do I want to do with it. And there's a lot of neat things you can do with it, depending on what kind of cardners you're playing with. Okay, next time it shows up as in Modern Horizons. It's on one black card and one colorless card. It then shows up next in Modern Horizons, too, on one white card and two green cards. As I said, proliferate mostly is supposed to be in black, green, and blue. I think if it's used in white and it's mostly used to pump plus one plus one encounters. That is something white can do.

Okay, the next time it shows up is in Infinity, we have stickers. And one of the abilities you can get on one of the stickers is proliferate. It's a triggered thing. I forget when it proliferates, but a creature that when it attacks proliferates or deals come and damage, cliffers, I forget the exact usage I had, but an infinity sticker does use proliferate. Okay, which gets us to phorexia, all will be one. So we were back in new phrexia. in Frexia all will be one.

We were setting up for the giant phrexian war, which was the end of the Frexian arc. And so we decided before we went and did the giant war, we wanted to visit New Phrexia. Now the phrexians in general, as a creature, are a bit ukey. They definitely

have body horror, and they're a little on the freaky side. So we decided that for the Frexian War, we wanted to minimize how often they showed up. And so early on they showed up in ones and twos and small numbers, and Dominary United, they were just in black. But we said, you know, there are fans of phrexia.

If we're going to do a phrexian arc, we should have one set that's just wall-to-wall phrexia. That's what frexia all would be one was. So one of the things is we had to revamp things. We were trying to feel like phrexians. And one of the things we realized is there's some stuff we had done before that we wanted to do differently.

One of the biggest things is R&D kind of cooled a bit to minus one-minus one counters. So we did try minus one-minus-on-minus encounters, but decided, can we not have minus one minus one counters? And that's what had made an interesting choice. I said, instead of minus one, minus one, or plus one, plus one, what if our dominant counter was something different, which ended up being oil counters?

And the idea was oil counters allowed us to just do different things, and we could bring back proliferate. Like, one of the things we said is, there were three things that players most associated with the phrexians, which was poison, proliferate, and phrexian mana. All three which had some problems. We didn't want to bring infect back, so we ended up making toxic, which was a variant, but did have poison. We brought back phrexian manna, but very specifically on some plains walkers, but in a very tight circumstance.

But we did bring it back. And finally, proliferate, we're like, well, let's bring polypherate back, but let's do something different with it. So the neat thing about phrexin all will be one is that the oil counters did a lot of different types of things. One of the things about it, because it was an unnamed counter, different cards could care about it in different ways. The only rule was that you wanted more oil counters because proliferate existed. So the idea is we made cards where having oil counters were good, not ones that were bad. We didn't make ones like, oh, the more oil counter is the worse it is. Oil was mostly something you, as a Frexene player, wanted to have.

And it was a lot of fun. Like I said, the fact that we've had three major sets that used proliferate, you know, the first one was all about poison minus one minus per counters. The second was all about loyalty and plus one plus one counters. The third was all about oil counters. The fact that each of those three environments worked really differently, and proliferate was a cool, like, intricate part of the environment, yet each of those played differently just shows what that we can do with proliferate.

And polyphrate is pretty cool in that way. We did also consider using it from March of the Machine, but we decided that we had just used it. We really had done a lot with it in Ferrexia-L-B-1, and we were doing more plus one plus one counter stuff from March of the Machine. Polyphorate is tough if you use too much plus one plus one counters. You can use a little bit, a mass worked fine. But if you're spreading them too much,

proliferate becomes a little bit too strong in limited formats. So we ended up not using March of the Machine. It next got used in one of the decks in Universes Beyond Fallout, one of the Fallout decks. And then it got used again in Modern Horizons 3 Commander. So you'll notice how all the modern horizon decks, although this was the commander deck, one of the commander decks, but one, two, and at least one of the commander decks and three all made use of it. It's a pretty fun mechanic, and whenever we get to the decadent design of modern horizons, we often use it because it's a lot of fun. Its final usage showed up in the Mystery Booster 2 on a playtest card called Phrexian Seedling that had proliferate link.

one of the things I started doing in Unsets I think I started with Squirrel Link where I took a Life Link and I did variance on LifeLink so like Squirrel Link you get a squirrel for every damage you do as opposed to gaining a life like LifeLink so proliferates once for each damage you do

I think it's on a small creature that you can if you buff up maybe you can proliferate more okay we're almost to work here today So proliferate. I believe we will use proliferate again for a couple reasons. One is it's a very popular mechanic. I really think the openness of it and the creativity with it,

it's definitely one of those mechanics are like, what can I do with this? And we keep making more cards with counters. We are a big fan of counters, counters on creatures, counters on players. And so there's always new and different things you can proliferate. So that is fun. So, like, just what proliferate... Polyphra is a neat mechanic that is dependent upon this extra system, the extra system being cards with counters.

Well, you know what? We really like cards with counters. So we keep sort of making things for that system. So proliferate keeps being fun. That's the reason why I'm pretty sure we will bring it back in that it just interacts in such fun ways with lots of things. Now, the big challenge, and this is the reason where I don't think proliferate just going to come back willy-nilly

is in any set where plus one plus one encounters play a major role, meaning where you can put a lot of plus one plus one counters on a lot of creatures, it becomes hard to use proliferate. Because proliferate, then the power proliferate is boosting all your creatures, and that is tough to do. So I will say I think proliferate will come back, but as evidenced by the fact that we tried it in three different sets that didn't end up making it, that's a pretty telling sign.

and what it says to me is proliferate is very fun there's a lot of cool things you can do with it but it itself inherently has some dangerous qualities to it which we have to be very careful when making us at. I think those dangerous qualities are part of the thing that make it exciting

it's very open-ended it does a lot of cool things but sometimes those cool things can be a little explosive and so in a limited environment we have to be very careful to make sure that it's doing what we need for it to do that said

I've not made this list maybe one of these days I'll do a top 20 of my favorite mechanics of all time I don't think I've done that one I did do one I'd say that back

I did do I did do that podcast so for one of the talks I did for Magicon I did the top 20 mechanics of all time and Pulifred was in that list and I did a podcast on that

so I in fact have done that so I guess not only is it would I have done it I have done it and you guys can go listen to it already. How's that for a... But anyway, I'm now at work. So any last thoughts

on proliferate? I'm very proud of the mechanic. I love... It's one of the things that I love most is magic has a lot of creativity to it. The combinatorics of magic are part of the most fun parts about it. And I like making a mechanic that when you see it, you're like, I'm not even sure what to do with this. This is a cool thing that does interesting stuff, but I need to go look at the history of magic to understand what I'm. can do. And I love the fact that we'll make new cards and all of a sudden you'll go,

ooh, maybe I could use proliferate with this. And that's one of the things that I really enjoy about it. Does proliferate ever cause us problems developmentally with play design? It's something we think about. I think when we make a charged counter, or a card with counters, we do think about the fact that proliferate exists. We are aware of that. Luckily for most things beyond plus one plus one counters, most counters grow at a rate that getting an extra counter usually isn't a giant growth issue, a big, you know, big issue with growth. But it is something we have to think about and something we have to be cautious of. But anyway, I do think we'll see proliferate again. I don't think we'll see it

willy-nilly. I think it'll be done carefully. But it is, I think, one of our finest mechanics. So anyway, that is my podcast on proliferate. So, by the way, if there are other mechanics, I've done a bunch of podcasts on mechanics. I've done like flashback and kicker and cycling and stuff. But if there are any mechanics that you would like to hear a podcast on, feel free to give me a ring or not ring, but I have social media. Contact me in social media and let me know other mechanics that you might like to hear a podcast on. So anyway, guys, I am now at works.

We all know what that means. It means at the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all. next time, bye-bye.