Sneak Attack

The cheat that priced an entire archetype. The repeatable activation severs creatures from their casting cost entirely: pay one red, drop anything from your hand onto the battlefield with haste, and the game stops measuring a fatty by its mana value and starts measuring it by the gap between what you paid and what it does before the end step claws it back. That sacrifice clause is the only discipline in the design, and it is a soft one. A creature that wins the instant it lands (a single swing, an enters-the-battlefield trigger that resolves before the body is sacrificed, a permanent token left behind) renders the drawback irrelevant, which is exactly the deckbuilding tension the card has imposed for its entire life. The repeatability is the part people undervalue: one red mana per activation means a hand of giants empties onto the table in a single turn, and the engine scales with whatever the biggest, ugliest creature in the format happens to be. Every printing of an oversized monster with a brutal arrival effect gets read, in part, as a question of whether it breaks this. The body of the card never changes; the ceiling does, every time a new finisher arrives. It has spent decades as the load-bearing accelerant for any deck whose plan is "the largest creatures, sooner than fair," and the only thing keeping it honest is that the creatures it cheats out have to earn their keep before sundown.