From an old issue of Marvel Age about Bill coming on Alpha Flight.

[Le Messor]

It is the most cynical approach to sequential storytelling I've ever seen.

Isn't that what happened when Captain America, Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver and Hawkeye became the Avengers?
When Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler and Colossus became the X-Men?

Just because those worked, doesn't mean they weren't cynical approaches!
Look at all the Events. Look at all the variant covers and gimmicks. Death of Superman. Breaking the Bat. - cynical marketing tools that sell comics.

Of course, if replacing the team was a standard approach by the time Mantlo took over AF, it may not have been simply a cynical ploy.

~ Le Messor
"I was sixty-six years old. I still had to make a living. I looked at my social security check of 105 dollars and decided to use that to try to franchise my chicken recipe. Folks had always liked my chicken."
~ Colonel Harland Sanders

[Garry/Al-Fan]

But, Alpha Flight was supposed to be "a different kind of super-team book."

If the killing of characters as the major direction for comic book creative switch in The Avengers, or The X-Men, or any of the other super-groups, then how does this give Alpha Flight "a completely different slant towards telling super hero stories"? If the "first job is going to be to pull the team together...and (o)nce they're held together as a team, they will act as a team. If one of them has a problem, that problem will involve the whole team, instead of specific individual adventures as you've seen in the first two years of ALPHA FLIGHT..."

Help me out, because in the first 6 months of the crossover, yes they got a (remote) headquarters with one omni-ship and Snowbird gave a brilliant speech in # 29 to galvanize the group, but I'm hard-pressed to see the evidence of them acting as a team. Maybe I missed it.