Bird Maiden

A three-mana 1/2 flier in red looks like a misprint by modern rate standards, but the rate is the point. Red was not supposed to have evasion, and Arabian Nights was the set where Wizards first tested what the color pie meant when a setting's flavor pulled against it: djinn and efreets in red and black, a roc-rider Bedouin in red, dervishes in white. This is the cheapest of those experiments, the one that says red can have a flier as long as the body is so far below curve that no deck would ever want it. The early flying creatures in red were vanishingly rare, and the ones that existed were priced as concessions to color-pie experimentation rather than playables: Roc of Kher Ridges at the top end, this at the bottom. The lineage that follows all inherits the question this card asked: what does red pay for getting into the air. The answer here was "almost everything," and it took a decade of color-pie drift before red fliers stopped feeling like an apology.