Take that, Insectile Aberration and Lingering Souls! :P

Aimed towards being a premier monoR 1-drop for constructed.

Isamaru, non-legendary, with nothing but upside, in a color that's not supposed to be as good with low-curve creatures?

@Sadistic: I'm not convinced that this creature is better than Goblin Guide, but if it is, he can lose his second ability or have it reduced to a single +1/+0. Also, Goblin Guide is better than Isamaru.

I changed the second ability as mentioned, since it was probably a bit too much as it was.

Hmm. I can't argue that Goblin Guide isn't better than Isamaru. I can say that there hasn't been any creature that was a straight-up 2/2 or better for one colored mana with or without any extra abilities, and with no down-side, except for Isamaru (which, admittedly, has the easiest down-side in the world to get around. Don't accidently play two.)

In theory, red is supposed to be 4th out of all the colors at making small creatures. Normally, red's small creatures are stellar because of great cheap support cards. If Goblin Guide is that awesome a card, I'd mark it up to a mistake by Wizards more than the gold standard... I think you'd have a hard time trying to find a second creature that would support your claim.

Hm. I was positive that Goblin Guide was waaaaaaaaay too good. (That is, that some of the best cards that wizards intend to print are stronger than I'd like, but this was even stronger than that.) The top ten comments on gatherer are all along the lines of "I won with this. It's broken, isn't it?"

However, I looked at some Modern aggro decklists, and it seems this is not an auto-include: it's included in Goblins decks and red decks, but in multicolour decks, there tends to be stuff like Grim Lavamancer and two drops like Tarmogoyf (see above re: broken).

One of the most comparable cards was wild nacatl (aka "kird ape on even more steroids") which is also a 1-drop that's often a 2/2 or 3/3. I guess this is comparable to that. It can never become a 3/3, but OTOH it's essentially always a 3/2 with no further hoop to jump through.

So, um. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility. But I don't think any 1-mana 2/2 fits into the normal design guidelines unless it has a drawback rather than an advantage.

I don't think that Goblin Guide was made by mistake -- it's easy for a developer with half a brain to know that if you've got a 1-mana 2/2 haster, letting your opponent draw a few extra lands isn't really much of a downside, since they're not too likely to get to play them all in a lot of games. Let's face it: Wizards is just straight up printing more aggressive creatures these days than they were in the days of Isamaru. I think part of it is the existence of Planeswalkers (they're just too strong if creatures aren't fast enough to threaten them), and part of it is their seeming belief that Magic is more interesting and easier to promote to a wider audience if games play out faster and are more about the combat step than slow, grindy games where card advantage is more important. I think we can take the recent printings of cards like Wild Nacatl, Kird Ape, Champion of the Parish, Stromkirk Noble, and Delver of Secrets to understand that aggressively efficient 1-drops are things that Wizards isn't exactly afraid to put out nowadays, and I don't think Goblin Burrowdriller is very far from the mark that these other cards are setting.

While I don't think this should be a 1-drop, what I'd like to point out here is that only planeswalkers are referred to by their gender.

I'm pretty certain this card isn't too powerful by today's standards. It's powerful, yes, but not too much so IMO. I'd run Goblin Guide over it in most metagames, this would only be better in flier-dominant ones. If playtesting determined that this card was too good, I would first try removing the second ability, then maybe reducing the toughness by 1.

FWIW, the cards you mentioned at least start as 1/1s, and WotC has admitted that Delver of Secrets was a mistake.

Personally, I think a lot of people give Goblin Guide too much credit. It only looks like your opponent can't benefit from the extra lands because the player of Goblin Guide isn't the opponent. How do they know? If the Goblin Guide allowed me to curve into Day of Judgment, I can curse all I want about the 6 damage dealt to me, but the Guide let me win the game, where I never would have recovered had the opponent just played a Dwarven Trader.

Mind you, I'm not mentioning this to keep the discussion open about what's fair at the 1cc slot for creatures. I think a lot of them should pull themselves up by the bootstraps. I think this design is too far, but, you know, everybody's got a different idea of how the game should be balanced, so I can respect that. I do, however, think that Tattermunge Maniac is a better card than Goblin Guide. It deals 2 less damage, but doesn't give your opponent 2 lands, and stops your opponent from having two dead draws (the lands he would have drawn) in the exchange. I know the philosophy of red is "let the n00b draw his whole deck. Unless he does something right now, he's dead", but, that can't really be right. There are times when attacking with Goblin Guide are going to make an opponent draw a Lightning Bolt one round earlier. The Goblin Guide player will lose because of that, and he'll never know that that's why he lost...

­Tattermunge Maniac is not even close to as good as Goblin Guide, hehe. But I understand your argument.

Here's another version of this card, what do you guys think?

He's still a 2/2 attacker, with some evasion for 1. And a goblin, to boot. Which obsoletes pretty much every other 1 drop. Why would I not put 4 of this into every red deck?

Whereas I think this is probably fine. There are quite a few 1-drop 2/2s that work in some specific deck even at common (or shockingly to me can't attack without some condition) so the original 2/2 with an upside was probably "not quite as good as goblin guide" which is probably right strength-wise, but it bugged me that it was strictly better than Grizzly Bears, which none of the other 1-drops were (all probably better, but all worse in some way).

So this is obviously still very strong, but I don't think it's obviously better than other top-tier red one-drops (goblin guide? stromkirk noble?)

I think this is printable. It's quite possible that we'll see something close to this within 4 years. If we don't, it's because they decided to send the pendulum somewhere else. With me, it's more about "Can I imagine Wizards doing this? In Magic2013?"... and I can. I don't think they will, but they could, so that's good enough for me. I'd be a bit upset... but that's only because I'm not a big fan of the type of deck that this card supports. Proponents of that deck would be happy, so I'd be happy for them.

And come to think of it, remember things like Diregraf Ghoul exist; this is comparable to that with an additional drawback (can't block ANY turn) and an additional bonus (a mild evasion ability) -- in other words, it doesn't seem surprising at all.

Yeah, I think pretty much all of the "And what about this!" cards strike me as "Uh... that card is way too strong to print" as well. So who the heck knows any more. Stupid moving target.

I hereby designate 2/2 one-drops as being the start of post-modern-magic (and claim my unknown armies point)

Thanks, I think this version is a little more clean, though not very competitive with Goblin Guide anymore, but it's still a fine card.

Goblin Guide is no longer in standard anyway. Not every card can be as useful as "the best 1 drop in a color in the game". This card, though, can make a good argument for why someone should play it over Guide. Sounds fine to me.