Infantry Veteran

The boost only ever fires inside the combat step, and only on the side that swings. Targeting an attacking creature makes the +1/+1 a purely offensive lever: it cannot save a blocker, cannot pump on defense, and asks you to commit to the swing before the help arrives. Gating the boost to attackers and tying it to a tap is what shapes the card: it becomes a repeatable, once-per-turn way to push damage through chump blocks or steal a combat trade the opponent thought they had locked up, but only on offense. The body is the trade-off: a 1/1 for one is fragile, and tapping it to pump usually means it is not attacking itself, so the Veteran works best behind a wider board it can prop up rather than as a beater in its own right. There is a subtlety worth knowing: once the ability is on the stack, it exists independently of its source, so killing the Veteran in response does nothing. The pump still resolves; the opponent simply trades a removal spell for a 1/1 a turn too late. This turns a static stat line into a slow-drip pump engine, the kind of card a go-wide deck leans on when it needs each attacker to punch slightly above its print. Variations on this shape have surfaced repeatedly in the years since, but this early-era version keeps the cleanest version of the bargain: cheap, repeatable, and locked to the one phase where attacking creatures exist.