Goblin Elite Infantry

Combat is where this Goblin gives back what it costs. The body looks like a clean two-drop for an aggressive tribe, but the moment it touches a fight (blocking or being blocked), it shrinks to a 1/1 for the turn, and that penalty is the price red paid for getting the body at all. There is no saved mana hiding here: the creature swings as a 2/2 on an open board, then trades down to almost anything the instant a blocker appears, dies to a one-power attacker it tries to chump, and cannot hold the ground on defense because blocking shrinks it too. This is combat-math design from a period when self-inflicted downside was still a live lever for pricing creatures, even ones already sitting at the going rate. What dates it is how unforgiving the tax turned out to be: a creature punished for engaging at all reads as a trap rather than a fair deal, and later red two-drops that wanted to attack were handed vanilla bodies or genuine upside instead of a built-in combat penalty. It marks the stretch of red's history where strings-attached pricing on an otherwise standard body still looked like sound design.