Goblin Archaeologist

Few cards put the gamble on the table as literally as this Goblin does. Tapping it is a bet: win the flip and you blow up an artifact and untap, free to do it again, again, as long as the coin keeps landing your way; lose it and the Goblin dies with nothing to show. There is no rate to evaluate here in the usual sense, because the cost is variance itself, paid in fifty-fifty increments until you either run the table or run out of luck. The untap clause is what makes the design more than a one-shot novelty: a winning streak chains into a board sweep against an artifact-heavy opponent, which is exactly the fantasy a coin-flip card is built to dangle. This kind of design surfaced at a high-water mark of artifact density, when printing an artifact-destruction engine that could theoretically clear several permanents off a single creature was a flavorful answer to a glut of targets, provided you were willing to court catastrophe. It is one of red's coin-flip cards that exists to be enjoyed rather than optimized, where the design intent is the swing between elation and self-immolation rather than reliable value. The Goblin Artificer creature type underlines the joke: a tinkerer just as likely to detonate himself as the machine he is poking at.