Kobold Overlord

The Kobold lord that asks why the tribe needed a lord at all. Legends printed a handful of free 0/1 Kobolds with no abilities (Crookshank Kobolds, Kobolds of Kher Keep, Crimson Kobolds), creatures whose only structural interest was that they cost nothing and shared a creature type nobody else used. This is the payoff: a 1/2 first striker that hands first strike to the rest of the tribe. The trouble is that first strike on a 0/1 body grants nothing usable. First strike only matters when the creature has power to deal in the first strike step, and a 0/1 has none; it simply deals no combat damage at all. The keyword is structurally inert until some other card supplies power, and that dependence is the whole story. Kobolds existed almost entirely to be buffed by other Kobolds, and the payoff cards (this and Kobold Taskmaster) only earned their slot if you ran the free vanilla bodies and then layered enough power-pumping on top to make a keyword like first strike relevant at all. Strip the ecosystem away and you have a two-mana 1/2 with a dead second line, and Wizards has been content to leave it there. The Overlord is a fossil of early tribal thinking: built before the lord template was standardized, before designers asked whether the shared keyword did anything on the creatures receiving it, and before anyone worried whether the supporting cast was worth casting alone.