Akki Underling

Seven cards in hand is the most awkward threshold this could ask for. Seven is the maximum you keep at end of turn, so the bonus switches on precisely when you have spent nothing: the turn you hold every card, this becomes a 4/2 first striker, and the turn you drop below seven it deflates back to a vanilla 2/1. A goblin in an aggressive shell wants to dump its hand to flood the board, so rewarding it for a clogged grip pulls it against the grain of both its color and its creature type. It belongs instead to the patient, resource-banking builds that this era kept gesturing toward, decks where a full hand is a feature rather than a sign you are stuck. The first strike does as much as the +2/+1: a 4/2 with first strike trades up the curve and walks away from combat a 2/1 would lose. But the deck that hoards cards rarely wants a two-drop beater holding the front, and the deck that wants cheap red bodies rarely hoards cards; the two halves almost never live in the same shell. What you are left with is a creature whose ceiling demands you do the opposite of what red usually does, and whose floor is exactly what red usually gets.