Ball Lightning

The original glass cannon, and the template every "huge body, brutal drawback" creature gets compared to. The design is one trade made explicit: six trample damage for three red mana, delivered the turn it lands thanks to haste, with the bill coming due at the end step when you sacrifice it. That end-step clause is the pressure valve that makes the rate legal; you rent the damage for one combat and own nothing afterward. The toughness of 1 is the second discipline, and it interacts with trample in exactly the way the design intends: a chump blocker dies and the creature dies, but the excess power still tramples over to the face, so denying the damage means meeting it with a high-toughness blocker, killing it before combat, or otherwise removing or preventing its hit. What makes the card a touchstone is how cleanly it isolated a single question: how much raw damage is three mana worth if the creature is guaranteed to die anyway? Designers have circled that answer for decades, almost always pulling back from it. Spark Elemental shrank everything to a single red mana and a 3/1. A dozen later hasty fliers borrowed the silhouette without the suicide clause. None of them are quite this card, because none are quite this willing to hand you everything and take it all back in the same turn. It is burn that happens to have a power and toughness, and it reads that way to this day.