Frostling

A pinger that fires exactly once, then dies. The trade Frostling offers is brutally legible: spend it as a one-mana body now, or hold it as a removal spell you can cash in later for a single point. Against a format of X/1 utility creatures (mana dorks, one-toughness hatebears, the disposable bodies that carry sacrifice and tribal payloads), that one point clears the board's most fragile threats at the cost of a permanent you were probably going to chump-block with anyway. The Spirit type matters less than the way the ability sits on the stack: because the damage is sacrifice-driven rather than tap-driven, it survives summoning sickness and can be activated the turn it lands, and it dodges the usual problem of a tapper being answered before it gets value. The design lineage runs through every cheap red creature that wants to be a card-and-a-half: a marginal attacker with a removal mode stapled on, where the body and the effect are the same resource spent two different ways. The ceiling is low by construction (one damage is not much, and you only get it once), but the floor is the appeal: a one-drop that never sits dead in hand because it always has a job, whether that job is poking in for a point or trading itself for something that costs more than a single red mana.