Daily Card Redesign #9: Magefire Wings

Daily Card Redesign is a daily Magic: The Gathering design exercise where I randomly choose a card for the scenario of it being killed late during its own set's development, and I design a replacement card that uses the same art, is the same color, is the same rarity, and has a name that, alphabetically, keeps it within the same collector number for the set.

My first multicolored card! I am excite!

So, a blue-red multicolored card is sorted into the section among the rest of the blue-red cards. So no shenanigans with changing its color can occur. There are no restriction on the card type this can be, though - green-blue has five out of five of its cards as creatures, for example. It'd be fun to change this card's card type!

This card could be a creature since the focus is ON a creature. It could be an instant or sorcery and just be a one-turn magical thing instead of be a permanent thing like how an Aura does.

Since my mind has been tainted with knowing that this a creature enchanted with Magefire Wings, I decided to show my sister, who is sitting near me as I type this, the art of Magefire Wings to see what she thinks is going on. Here's a paraphasing of how she described:

"I see hooves. Like a horse. But it looks like a cat. Like a cat horse thing. It's got a tail. And it looks like it's flying. Like it's flying through the galaxy. But I don't know what's going with the blue thing around its head."

Cat horse, eh? It's awesome apt a description this is for the Leotau:

Grizzled Leotau by Lars Grant-West

The one in the art has armor on like they did when they are on Bant. Both Grizzled Leotau and Wild Leotau are not like the "Bant-ed up" one in the art of Magefire Wings.

Anyway...

So it's a flying leotau. If it were a creature, this just wouldn't make sense. Unless it were an Illusion! Thanks to blue, you can do many, if not all, creature types with a pairing with the Illusion creature type. For example, Phantasmal Bear and Phantasmal Dragon.

But it doesn't quite look right as an Illusion. It looks like its body is solid earthen material while the magical stuff is happening overhead. It looks like it's flying... but wait. What if it's not flying around on the battlefield? What if it's in the middle of being unsummoned? But there's fire! ...Like, Unsummon with damage?

This reminds me of Essence Backlash! A counterspell with damaging the spell's controller equal to its power. How about we do the same thing except with unsummoning? Got it!

Before I moved on, I checked to see if there were any similar blue-red spells in the Alara Reborn set that would make this card produce redundant effects. Answer: almost! Deny Reality returns any sort of permanent. But there isn't one that returns just creatures. Good enough for me!

Now, let's deduce the appropriate cost for this new spell - Essence Backlash counters creature spells. Countering a creature spell costs 1U, as you can see with Essence Scatter. The remaining effect costs 1R, apparently. And that's what will stay the same for this new card. So, we need 1R + whatever the cost of an Unsummon is. Answer: U. Put 'em together, and you get a card that costs three mana!

Since Unsummons are used not only to return opponents' creatures to their owners' hands but sometimes on your own creatures - I made sure that the damage was optional, so you wouldn't have to hit yourself in the face to save your own creature.

Lastly, I like how Essence Backlash is like Essence Scatter in its naming for the differences between the effects. Am I able to do the same with Unsummon? ...Nah. Instead, I found something quite suitable that's the synonym of "backlash."

...And then I found out that Backfire already exists. Damn. Would have been a great name for this. 

So here ya go:

Doesn't it seem like the creature, with the blue part, is dissolving back into magical energy? And then that blue energy is turning into red energy, which is the damaging part when it comes back to the controller.