Mogg Fanatic

A willing one-drop that cashes itself in for a guaranteed point, and the original statement of an archetype the game has iterated on ever since. The design idea is that a small body is also a stored point of reach: the goblin blocks, attacks, or chumps until you need it, at which moment it converts directly into a damage source by paying its own existence as the activation cost. That conversion is the whole engine. Because the sacrifice is folded into an activated ability, the point goes on the stack the moment you decide it should, which is exactly what makes the card so hard to answer: aim removal at the goblin and you simply respond by activating, sacrificing it for the damage before the spell resolves. The targeting is just as flexible. You can swing, get blocked, and still send the point to a planeswalker or to the face in response to combat, sidestepping the math of the block entirely. The catch that balances it is that the damage is locked to your own choice to activate: sacrifice is the cost, not a death trigger, so feeding the goblin to some other outlet gives you the body but not the point. The 1/1 frame does precisely the work it should, cheap enough to spend freely, with the stored damage as the reward for committing it. Later goblins refined the rate with bigger bodies, more damage, or recursion attached, but the structural shape here, a one-drop that ends as a guaranteed point on the stack, is what every "sacrifice for reach" goblin since has been written against.