Triskelion

The pinger archetype begins here. Splitting a creature's body into discrete damage charges was a structural invention: the +1/+1 counters double as a life total and as ammunition, so every shot weakens the shooter. That self-cannibalizing design is what made the card a workshop for combo builders for decades. Pair it with a repeatable engine that puts counters back on (Power Conduit, the Mikaeus reanimation loop) and the ammunition becomes infinite; pair it with a sacrifice outlet and the three damage becomes a finisher rather than a slow drip. The body itself is almost beside the point: a 1/1 frame carrying three removable pips, where the pips do all the work.

The lineage it started is long. Walking Ballista is the most direct descendant, collapsing the same engine into a scalable X-cost shell and proving the design still had teeth thirty years on; Hangarback Walker borrowed the counters-as-resource frame for a different purpose; Endless One and the modulars of Mirrodin all drink from the same well. What Triskelion did first was establish that an artifact creature could be a permanent on the battlefield and a stack of removal spells at the same time, with the conversion rate set by how willing you were to dismantle it. Every "shoot something with a counter" card since has been working inside the design space this one opened.