Raging Goblin

Haste reduced to its smallest possible package: one red mana buys a single keyword and nothing else attached. That austerity is the point. Where later red one-drops piled on text (a death-trigger, a damage clause, a graveyard ability), this one exists to demonstrate the keyword in isolation, the plainest possible answer to "what does haste do." It came out of Portal, the beginner-facing product where mechanics were stripped to their plainest expression and even reminder text earned its space. A small body that can swing the turn it lands is the simplest honest demonstration, and the card was built to be that and nothing more. Its design legacy is instructive precisely because it has none of the wrinkles that make red one-drops interesting on their own; every aggressive Goblin printed since has either justified a higher rate with extra text or accepted that a vanilla-plus-haste body is replacement-level. The card maps the floor of the category, and the floor it maps is a real one: a hasty attacker for a single mana is the cheapest clock the game offers. Reading the rest of red aggro as a series of upgrades to this baseline is a useful way to see how the color has grown.