The Selesnya revere nature and growth, and seek to restore parts of Ravnica to their natural state. The populate mechanic puts a copy of one of your creature tokens onto the battlefield.


Eyes in the Skies


Like many (although not all) populate cards, Eyes in the Skies gives you a token to get you started. So first you'll put a 1/1 white Bird creature token with flying onto the battlefield, then you'll choose a creature token you control to get a copy of. That means you can choose your new Bird token and get a second Bird token—but you don't have to. If you control some other token you'd rather have a copy of—say, a 4/4 green Rhino with trample—you can get another one of those instead! If you have a token that's already a copy of something, perhaps because of Rite of Replication or Spawnwrithe, you could even choose that.

The copy of your token is a separate token, and isn't affected by anything that happens to the first token before or after you copy it. For example, if you cast Giant Growth targeting a 1/1 white Bird token with flying, then populate and copy the Bird token, the new Bird will just be a 1/1, even though the original was a 4/4 when you copied it.

Populate doesn't target anything, and you don't have to choose a token to copy until you're actually populating. For example, say you control a 1/1 white Bird token with flying and a 4/4 green Rhino token with trample, and you cast a spell that populates, planning to copy the Rhino token. Your opponent casts Doom Blade in response to kill the Rhino. When your spell resolves, you'll still be able to choose the Bird token. Your opponent can't wait until you choose which token to copy and then kill that one; by that time, your spell is already resolving, and it's too late to cast Doom Blade.