Goblin Commando

The rate dates this card to an earlier era of common-rarity design, when an enters-the-battlefield removal trigger stapled to a body was considered a fair exchange even at a price that buys far more elsewhere now. The body is incidental; the value is front-loaded into that 2 damage, which clears a small attacker, finishes something a blocker softened, or removes a key utility creature the turn it arrives. The damage hits creatures only and cannot reach a player, so this is removal-on-a-stick in the narrowest sense: a creature that pays for part of its own cost by trading on the way in. That design pattern (a Goblin that shoots something when it lands) is durable precisely because it is so legible, the lineage running through small red creatures that turn a cast into a removal spell plus a chump. What dulls Goblin Commando is not the effect but the math: two damage was never going to scale with the bodies it competes against, and the entry fee is steep for a body this fragile in any environment that rewards efficiency. It reads less as a card built to dominate than as a clean illustration of how an early-era common bundled creature and removal before the format tax on that combination came down.