Goblin General
The attack-trigger lord is a quieter design than the static anthem, and that distinction is the whole story here. Most tribal pumpers of this era held a permanent +1/+1, raising your goblins on defense and offense alike; this one only fires when it swings, and the bonus lasts only until end of turn. The trade is that it offers no protection on the back foot. What you get instead is an alpha-strike incentive that lines up with how a goblin board wants to play anyway: go wide, then commit to the red zone all at once. Because the trigger keys off this creature's own attack rather than a continuous effect, the buff arrives only on the turn you swing with it, which rewards flooding the board first and committing the General into the red zone rather than holding it back as a defensive anthem. The 1/1 body is fragile and the cost is steep for what amounts to a one-turn, single-pulse buff, which marks this as a product of the simplified Portal design language, where complexity got shaved off in favor of clean, readable battlefield math. Read against the later goblin lords that settled on the permanent anthem, this is an early sketch of the same idea built around a different verb: attack, not exist.



