Carrier Pigeons

Four mana for a 1/1 flier that eventually replaces itself is the kind of low-stakes value creature mid-90s design leaned on before cantrip math got tight, and the deferred draw is what the costing is really paying for. The card does not arrive when the Bird enters; the entry trigger instead sets up a separate delayed draw that fires at the beginning of the next turn's upkeep, which, if you cast it on your own turn, is usually the opponent's. Once the enters-the-battlefield ability resolves, the draw is locked in: kill the Bird in response to combat or on the opponent's turn and the card still comes, because the delayed trigger no longer cares whether its source is on the battlefield. The deferral is doing budget work, not survival work. It pushes the value into the future, so the deck pays four mana for a flier now and a card later, with the tempo cost of the wait standing in for the rate a cleaner cantrip would charge up front. That separates it from the tighter enters-and-draw template later sets settled on, where the draw resolves immediately and the body is incidental. Here the draw and the body are decoupled in time, an early-era designer hedging the cantrip by stretching it across turns rather than gating it behind keeping a 1/1 alive. A modest piece of evasive air support whose interest lies in watching the cantrip-creature idea get costed before the game learned how cheaply it could be sold.