Coppercoat Vanguard

Human tribal has always leaned on flat power buffs: the anthem that turns a wide board lethal, the lord that pushes a stalled attack over the top. What separates this one from the long line of tribal lords is the ward rider stapled onto the +1/+0. The offensive half is familiar; the defensive half is the design story. Ward does not stop removal outright, and it does not lock your own team out the way shroud would (unlike shroud, it leaves your creatures perfectly legal targets for your own pumps and combat tricks). Instead it makes every point-and-click answer cost a mana more, which is exactly the friction a go-wide deck wants: the aggressor spends nothing extra to attack, while the defender pays a tax on every interaction just to slow the clock. Cast it early and the opponent's sweepers still work, but their spot removal starts falling a turn behind the beatdown. The buff and the ward both exclude the source itself, so the Vanguard hands out protection it never enjoys: a 2/2 body carrying a static ability but no ward of its own, clean for any unpaid answer. That asymmetry (shielding the swarm while standing exposed at the front of it) is the tension the card is built around, and it rewards flooding the board fast enough that killing the one unprotected creature stops mattering.