Ambush Party

A textbook case of a set's design failing its own creatures. The rate reads like a typo: a 3/1 body for five mana dies to almost anything, first strike lets it trade up in a pinch but the cost undoes any bargain, and haste only buys a single point of tempo for a creature that cannot survive a return swing. The math is the whole story. Contemporaries were already offering more power, more toughness, or both at a lower cost, often without the dead-on-arrival fragility. First strike wants a body cheap enough to be worth committing to combat; haste wants a body worth rushing onto the board. Stapling both keywords to this stat line gives you two abilities pulling toward an aggressive role the creature cannot actually fill. The design idea (a hasty first striker that ambushes blockers) is sound; the execution priced it well outside the range where any of that mattered. Cards like this get cited when players talk about how far the mid-nineties was from understanding what creatures should cost.