Goblin Balloon Brigade

A red one-drop whose entire identity lives in its activation: pay one mana to give a 1/1 body flying for the turn, on demand, in the same color that already wants to dump its mana into attacking. That structure (a ground creature that buys evasion by the turn, at a price the curve can absorb) is an early articulation of "mana sink as evasion," and it predates the vocabulary the game later built around the idea. Every subsequent budget flier in the color, every red one-drop with a combat-relevant pump, every "pay one to swing over" design descends from this Alpha original. The rate has been outclassed many times since, but the shape has not: a creature whose threat is not its body but the cost of ignoring its mana. The flavor is load-bearing too. Goblins riding a hot-air balloon into combat established a register of red-as-slapstick-engineering that the color has returned to for thirty years, and the card keeps resurfacing as a recurring signature of what a basic red goblin looks like at common.