Kobold Taskmaster

The punchline to one of Magic's earliest design jokes. The Legends Kobolds (Kobolds of Kher Keep, Crookshank Kobolds, Crimson Kobolds) were zero-mana 0/1 bodies printed as red's answer to a question nobody had asked, and this is the lord that turned the gag into a deck. Stack its +1/+0 with a second Taskmaster and a board of free 0/1s becomes a board of 2/1s and 3/1s; the entire archetype runs on the math of multiplying zero-cost bodies by a flat power bonus. The design is the cleanest possible expression of the lord template: no tribe-defining keyword, no protective rider, just the anthem that makes the Kher Keep horde lethal. The flat +0 toughness bump is the telling restraint. Wizards wanted the swarm to hit hard, not to survive a board wipe, which keeps the archetype honest as a glass-cannon combo rather than a grindy creature deck: the Kobolds remain 1-toughness even with the lord online, so one sweeper unwinds the whole thing. That structural logic (a lord worthless in isolation and devastating in concert, gating a tribe nobody otherwise plays) became a recurring shape for narrow tribal payoffs in the decades since. Few cards illustrate the lord-as-load-bearing-piece principle as starkly as this: pull it off the board and the deck reverts to a pile of harmless 0/1s.