Daily Card Redesign #71: Swamp Mosquito

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. 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:

I saw that this was the only poison creature in Alliances. But I also saw that being few in number in previous sets before it was a common trend for poison creatures, and I didn't want to take away another key component of a poison deck. So, I stuck with poison.

Seeing as this is the only Alliances poison card, I had to make sure that a player could win the game with it using just this card by itself. This is just in case a player hadn't bought cards from any other sets. But since it's a common, I couldn't do very much repeatable effects without making it uncommon. And Swamp Mosquito's original design is pretty dead-on in how to pull off a common with the ability to win the game by itself: through attacking repeatably.

I decided that this mosquito could be a subtle one where it's attached to a creature you control and flies over and bites the player whenever the creature it's enchanting makes it through and hits the other player. Boom. Common poison card that can win all on its own.

If this weren't the only poison card in Alliances, I was wanting to explore options as an instant/sorcery and giving the player a single poison counter directly, as that hasn't existed, yet.