Lightning Elemental

A 4/1 with haste is a fossil of haste-tax pricing, the era when the keyword was treated as a premium rider rather than a free upgrade. The body offers a fair-to-soft rate, and the haste is what the design wants you to feel you are paying extra for; the chassis underneath is deliberately too brittle to make the keyword pay off twice. It dies to any incidental damage, it swings once, and the turn after it offers nothing new. What you are really buying is the four points of immediate damage the moment it can attack, with haste billed as a feature rather than folded into a creature you would run anyway. That is the accounting this card sits at the front of: a single turn of relevance, charged at premium, on a body that cannot survive long enough to use the speed more than once. Later red creatures resolved the tension by pricing the body to live through a swing, or by stapling haste to threats that genuinely wanted to attack again and again, treating the keyword as a low-cost rider rather than the headline. This one is the earlier draft of that conversation, the version where designers still thought immediacy alone was worth a tax, before they settled on the principle that haste only matters on a creature worth playing without it.