Daily Card Redesign #136: Viridian Scout

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:

The first thing I wanted this to be was a creature with flash and an enters-the-battlefield plummet effect. But that is uncommon territory. Scrap that. The main focus of this card is that this guy is catching a creature by surprise. So, I wanted to keep flash.

Next, I wanted to make a flash creature with stats that have never existed before. There's been a 2/2 for 1G with flash in the form of Ashcoat Bear. So we either gotta go bigger or smaller in terms of power and toughness. We can't go bigger because the art depicts one mere elf. So, the obvious thing was to go smaller.

After that, I remembered the 1/1 Kithkin with flash that can be cast for either a white or blue mana. Taking that into consideration, green can also have a 1/1 for one colored mana. But that already exists with this Kithkin! AND the flashing Kithkin is already more flexible with that hybrid mana for a cost. 

How do we differentiate this redesigned card from that Kithkin? Two things: green's good at creatures. Anything white and blue can do, green can do better. AND you have a not-as-flexible non-hybrid colored mana in the cost of the redesigned card. With those two factors, I deemed it O.K. for green to have a 1/2 for G that also flashes onto the battlefield. Never existed before! Ta-da.