A-Alrund, God of the Cosmos // A-Hakka, Whispering Raven
The tension was always the distance between two faces that reward opposite instincts. Hakka is the entry point: a 1/1 flier that bounces itself on combat damage and scries two, a bird that never sticks around to die because connecting sends it home to sculpt the top of your library. That self-return is the mechanical bargain, since it hands the card back to you ready to be recast as the other mode. Alrund's power scales off cards in hand and foretold cards in exile, which turns the deck's entire information economy into a body: every held card, every foretell down payment, feeds it directly. Its end-step trigger keeps that hand fed, sorting draws by type rather than raw count so the god grows on your own terms. As a modal double-faced card, this is not a transform: the two halves never share the battlefield. Hakka goes to hand, and you choose whether to redeploy the bird for more tempo and scrying or pay full freight for the god. The rebalanced version exists because the original asked players to commit real resources to foretell and card advantage before the payoff landed, and the digital knobs let Wizards retune where that payoff sits. The design's throughline is the choice the bounce keeps offering: stay aggressive and evasive with Hakka, or cash the accumulated hand into a game-ending Alrund whenever the numbers finally justify it.
