A different, fairly simple approach approach to a DFC land that turns into a creature.

That was my suggestion for Epiphyte Elder once - the issue is the interaction with discovery. But you care less about that, so that's probably fine with you.

I believe that cards that can be found in your deck as nonbasic lands with basic land types are a must for a discovery set though.

I more desire it to fulfill the inverse role/niche.

Actually, my initial design of this was to add recursion transform to it on the second side, like "When Awakened Oak dies, return it to the battlefield transformed". That's a different idea, though hard to figure the balance of.

It's actually close to how manlands usually work (since they are removal resistant), but without the amount of mana tied up in animating the land.

In the main branch I'd probably just make the back-side a Forest Treefolk land creature. ^^

True, it could go that route (Land -> Land Creature). Which would make it more compatible with Discovery.

I'm wondering how this stacks up with Stirring Forest in the main set now though. It's sort of trying to do much the same thing at uncommon, Stirring Forest just has higher toughness and says "untap it", and it's life loss instead of entering tapped.

­Stirring Forest is untested and might easily end up right here again due to parallel evolution.

That's cool. The land designs are pretty vital to get right for Pyrulea for sure.

If it weren't for some of the pushed P/T's I'd be inclined to say that the cycle Stirring Forest is part of might be better at uncommon and more like this card.

P/Ts are not set in stone.

Could form the basis for a cycle.