Festering Goblin

Removal stapled to a creature, paid for by the creature having to die first. The death trigger turns the trade you lose into a trade you win: block or chump, and when the Goblin dies the -1/-1 lands on a second creature, often one already shrunk by combat damage, converting a one-for-one into a one-for-two. The shrink is also a clean kill on a stranded X/1 or on anything you have already pinged down. The constraint is exactly where the value lives: the trigger keys on the Goblin's own death, so an opponent who refuses to attack into it or block it can simply leave it standing on the battlefield, doing nothing at all. That is the hole a sacrifice outlet patches. A free way to throw the Goblin to the graveyard takes the trigger out of the opponent's hands and lets you fire the shrink on demand, into a blocker that was never going to die otherwise. It does not become repeatable (one Festering Goblin, one death, one trigger), but it becomes reliable, which matters more for a card whose entire worth is a single posthumous point. The Zombie Goblin line answers to two separate tribal axes at once, a rare overlap that lets a one-drop slot into builds caring about either creature type. The friction is honest: a lone point of toughness reduction kills little by itself, so the card always leans on combat math or a target already softened.