Determined Iteration
Populate has almost always been Selesnya's word: a green-white mechanic built to widen a board of go-wide tokens, patient and additive. Reframing it in red flips the whole tempo of the thing. Instead of banking a durable copy for the long game, this makes a haste-enabled attacker every combat and then feeds it back to the graveyard once the turn winds down, converting a static token engine into a recurring aggressive threat. Because it copies a creature token you already control, the effect needs a board to work from, and it rewards tokens that carry an attack trigger or a death trigger: the sacrifice clause stops being a downside and becomes the second half of an engine. Copy a token with a saboteur ability and you collect the value on the way in; feed the copy to a sacrifice payoff and you collect it on the way out. That built-in expiration is the point: the effect deliberately refuses to snowball an ever-growing army of permanent bodies, trading permanence for velocity in a way that answers populate's reputation for being slow and grindy. It sits in a small lineage of cards that hand red a token strategy without asking it to play the go-wide long game, and the attack-then-recycle loop is what makes it feel red rather than a color-shifted Selesnya card.
