This paper presents a study of the cascode low noise amplifier (LNA) with inductive degeneration in low-power regime. We will study transducer gain and noise figure, with lossy input matching network. In particular, we will prove that, under input impedance matching for maximum power transfer, there is a relationship between the available gain and the output reflection coefficient of the input matching network. This and other aspects will lead us to conclude that input integrated matching for maximum power transfer and minimum noise is a suboptimal design methodology for lossy networks. To achieve superior noise and gain performances, we propose a new design methodology and apply it to the design of a 2.4 GHz low-power LNA as a case study.