Daily Card Redesign #62: Birds of Paradise

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.

Redesign:

An island is prominent in the background, but so is the Bird. I didn't want to keep perpetuating the idea that it's O.K. for green to have flying creatures, so I didn't do a creature. Because, otherwise, I would be force to make it flying - because the bird is obviously flying.

Because the island is prominent in the background, I thought of green's ability to get mana of different colors. There weren't any land fetching cards in Alpha. So I went in that direction. And because the bird is a large part of the picture, I also went with having the trigger key off of creatures entering the battlefield.

Because this is a rare card, an enchantment was in order. Otherwise, a rare sorcery or instant land fetching lands would have to be pretty unique - and I didn't want to get too crazy for Alpha. So, repeatable land fetching it is.