Undead Warchief

Zombie tribal had plenty of cheap bodies before this and a fair number of payoffs after, but the lord that fronts a cost reducer and an anthem in the same package is the one that turned the deck from a pile of 2/2s into an engine. The cost reduction compounds the way nothing in the tribe did at the time: each subsequent Zombie spell drops by one, so a hand that stalls on lands suddenly empties itself, while the +2/+1 turns the resulting board into something a fair deck cannot race or block profitably. The extra toughness matters as much as the power, lifting the deck's small bodies above the line where a single sweeper or a 2-power blocker trades up; the +2 power does the closing. Its own 1/1 frame reads worse than it plays, because the anthem is not worded to exclude itself: the Warchief buffs to a 3/2 and attacks alongside everything else it pumps. The catch is fragility, not irrelevance. It dies to almost any removal and takes the whole board's bonus with it, which is exactly why decks ran four and treated each copy as disposable. Goblin Warchief shipped the same template to red in the same era (haste in place of the extra toughness, the equivalent cost break on Goblins), and the pairing tells you what Wizards was after: a tribal payoff that rewards committing hard to one creature type rather than splashing it. This is the version that asks the most of the deck around it and gives the most back when that deck shows up.