Prodigal Sorcerer

The original pinger, and the card that gave the entire design space its nickname. Tim (the moniker stuck so hard the archetype took its name) established a complete idea in a single line of rules text: a fragile body whose value lives entirely in the tap symbol, repeatable damage as both a clock and a removal engine, and a cost that pays for the engine rather than the stats. Where a burn spell front-loads its damage and walks away (Lightning Bolt buys three points for one mana and is done), this front-loads nothing and asks the board to stay open long enough for the pings to accumulate. That tension (a do-nothing turn followed by an unbounded one) is what every successor has tuned against. Cuombajj Witches bolted on a drawback, Izzet Staticaster narrowed the targeting to creatures and shrank the cost, and the modern wave of pingers tends to graft the ability onto a cheaper body or attach it to an enters-the-battlefield trigger to skip the summoning-sickness tax. None of them retire the original; they react to it. The competitive case is long gone (a 1/1 that needs a turn to come online is a rate from a different era), but the design vocabulary it created (the pinger, the tapper, the repeatable point of damage as a build-around) is one of the few early-era contributions still actively generating new cards.