Goblin Cavaliers

Attack, trade, repeat: the entire strategic conversation around this goblin starts and ends with the combat step. Portal Second Age dealt out plain bodies like this because its decks were assembled to walk newcomers through the basics of attacking and blocking, not to clear the development hurdles of an expert-level expansion. The body does all the talking: big enough to push damage or trade up the curve, soft enough to die to almost any answer. Within the set's goblin slice, this was the workmanlike beater, the creature whose only job was to swing. The point worth cataloging is that Portal cards trickled into the wider tournament-legal pool over time rather than arriving all at once, which is why a vanilla goblin from a starter product earns its own database entry beside the keyword-stuffed goblins that followed. There is no friction to analyze, no window to exploit, no counter to track: it is the baseline against which every goblin with an actual ability gets measured. Plain red beef, printed for a deck meant to introduce combat math, and honest about exactly that.