Slingshot Goblin

Few cards wear their hostility as openly as this Goblin: a repeatable pinger that simply cannot point its damage at anything that isn't blue. It belongs to an era of loud, asymmetric color-pie warfare, and it is the bluntest expression of that idea on the red side, a 2/2 archer whose entire reason to exist is shooting down Merfolk, drakes, and the small blue tempo creatures of its day. Strip the color clause and it would be a Prodigal Sorcerer that hit twice as hard; the restriction is the price of that doubled output, trading away every non-blue target in the game for the right to fire a repeatable Shock rather than a repeatable tickle. That makes it the rare creature whose value is entirely a function of who is sitting across the table: against a deck with no blue creatures its ability has no legal target and it is just a 2/2, and against a blue-creature deck it can fire two damage every turn for a single red mana, enough to clear most relevant blue bodies on the spot. It is part of a small family of color-keyed hosers once printed as maindeckable creatures rather than sideboard spells, betting that a player who knew the matchup would happily run a body that does nothing in the wrong one. That design philosophy has since given way to softer, more flexible hate, which leaves this Goblin a clean artifact of how aggressively early-era sets policed the color wheel.