Wake the Reflections

Populate as a standalone spell, stripped of the body or trigger that usually carries it. Most populate effects ride on something else: a creature with the keyword stapled to combat, an enchantment that fires it every upkeep, a multi-mode instant where copying a token is one option among several. Here the mechanic is the whole card, sold for the cheapest price the keyword could carry, which exposes exactly what populate is and is not. It does nothing without a creature token already on the board, so this is the rare one-mana spell whose floor is a dead card and whose ceiling is set entirely by what you have to copy: a Wurm, an Angel, a hydra token sized to your battlefield. The catch worth understanding is that populate copies only the token's copiable values, the base characteristics it was printed or created with. A +1/+1 counter, an aura, a piece of equipment, a temporary buff: none of it carries over, so a counter-laden token comes back as its bare-bones original. That makes this a multiplier on the original investment, not on whatever you have since stacked on top of it. As one mana of white sorcery, it asks a question most cheap spells do not: not what does this do, but what have you built for it to do. Remove the token board and there is no card; supply a token worth doubling and there is no cheaper way to do it.