Taunting Kobold

The Kobolds have always been a Richard Garfield joke made mechanically real: 0/1 bodies printed with no mana cost, good for chump-blocking and the occasional Rohgahh-fueled swarm and little else. This one hands the tribe a real job by pairing the flimsiest body in the game with a redirect. A one-mana attacker whose only impact is aiming an opponent's creature away from you does not want to win combat; it wants to sit at the head of a formation, absorb whatever comes back, and hope the goad has already done its work before the blockers arrive. Haste matters far more here than on most bodies this small, because the card contributes nothing on defense and everything on the swing: it wants to point a threat elsewhere the turn it lands. That the goad fires on attack rather than as an enters trigger is the design's whole shape, since the effect only recurs while the Kobold keeps marching forward, which a 0/1 without evasion will not always survive to do. The mechanism cuts differently by table size. In a duel, goad simply drags a would-be blocker into a swing it would rather sit out, and with no other opponents to redirect toward, that creature must come at you: the effect turns clumsy, a nudge that points the threat back home. In multiplayer it becomes what it was built for, a cheap lever for keeping the strongest attacker on the board pointed at someone who is not you.