Goblin Lackey

Survive to turn two and connect, and the game is already bent: the trigger fires, and a Goblin permanent in hand becomes a Goblin permanent on the battlefield, free, with no regard for what it costs. That is the entire design, and it is a brutal one. The 1/1 body is irrelevant; the card is a tax on the opponent's opening, daring them to spend a removal spell on a one-drop before it can attack. If they don't answer it during their turn, the swing drops something far bigger than should buy: Siege-Gang Commander, Goblin Ringleader, anything with "Goblin" in its type line and a cost the Lackey gleefully ignores. The only real governor is that the trigger keys off dealing damage to a player, which (absent some granted ping) means combat, and combat means a turn of vulnerability before the payoff: the Lackey has to live through the opponent's untap, and it has no haste, so the earliest it threatens anything is the second turn. What enters is no faster, either; the dropped permanent arrives during combat already summoning-sick, so a Goblin with a tap ability sits idle until your next turn. The disproportion is in the mana, not the speed. Generations of Goblin decks have been built backward from this card, treating the early game as a binary: did the Lackey land a hit or not? Wizards has spent decades printing one-drop enablers that ask for a payment; few have offered a payoff this lopsided to the cost, and none has retired the original.