Banehound

Haste and lifelink almost never share a body at one mana, because each keyword on its own is usually priced at a full mana; stacking both onto a single black one-drop is the kind of rate that only works when the body is deliberately fragile. The 1/1 is the tax that keeps the bundle honest: it dies to any blocker and to nearly any removal, so on its own it swings once for a point of life and a point of pressure, then folds. That thin margin is why the card reads as a specialist rather than a beater. Its home is in decks that treat a hasty, lifelinking body as reusable material rather than a stat line: sacrifice engines that want cheap fodder that trickled you life first, recursion loops that keep returning it, blink effects that let it come down and attack immediately because haste erases the summoning-sickness delay on every arrival. The design point is the arrival, not the fight. A creature that shows up ready to attack, connects for a small life dividend, and then gets consumed or recycled is doing work a bigger, slower body cannot. Judged as a combatant it is flimsy; judged as an engine component that pays out the instant it hits the board and asks to be used again, the shape of the design comes into focus.