Krark-Clan Grunt

Built to convert an artifact-dense board into combat tempo, this Goblin treats the rest of its deck as ammunition: each artifact fed to it buys a point of power and, more importantly, first strike for the turn. The first-strike clause is the part worth weighing, because it flips a 2/2's losing exchanges into winning ones, letting the Grunt block above its weight or push through a bigger creature without trading down. The cost is open-ended (any artifact qualifies), which fits an early-era mindset that read artifacts as a renewable resource rather than a precious one, where cheap artifact creatures and Equipment meant the fuel was usually sitting on the table. The flip side is that this same flexibility makes the Grunt a poor standalone threat: strip away a board built to be sacrificed and the ability sits dormant, leaving a 2/2 with nothing to spend and an activation it cannot pay for. It wants a sacrifice-economy shell where it is one of several mouths to feed rather than the centerpiece, somewhere the artifacts are being thrown away for value anyway. As a payoff it is narrow, tethered to a single creature's combat math, but it belongs to the line of early red designs that treated artifacts as aggressive fuel rather than a metalcraft enabler or a long-game engine.