Jeska, Warrior Adept

Pinging arrives stapled to a creature here, and the package is unusually pointed: 3/1 with first strike means she trades up in combat against most early aggressors and survives the swing, while haste lets her tap for damage the turn she lands. That last part is the design hinge. Most creatures that come down with a tap-to-ping ability force you to wait a turn before the engine starts; granting haste closes that window and turns Jeska into an immediate piece of reach. The 1-toughness body is the cost of that aggression, keeping a recurring damage source from being too durable a control element. As a flavor anchor she also matters: Jeska is the Pardic barbarian who becomes Phage and eventually Karona across the Odyssey-Onslaught block arc, and this is her first card, the warrior before the transformation. The pinging she does here is the cleanest version of what she would later do at planeswalker scale, where the same point-of-damage-per-activation logic returns in larger, repeatable form. As a creature, the rate asks you to protect her: she is at her best when the controller already has board presence and can afford to keep tapping her at small targets rather than committing her to the red zone.