Stand Firm

The pump is the alibi here. A combat trick that bumps a creature by a single point has filled white commons since the earliest sets, almost always a coin-flip in actual combat: you save a blocker or you don't, and the card does nothing in your hand otherwise. Bolting scry 2 onto that frame changes the proposition. The +1/+1 becomes the upside rather than the reason, which inverts how a trick like this gets played: instead of holding it for the perfect block and feeling the cost when that block never comes, you cast it whenever there is a body on the board worth touching and let it smooth your draw, with the combat relevance demoted to a bonus that occasionally swings a race. The catch that keeps this from being a pure free roll is the target line. The spell still demands a creature to pump, so an empty board leaves it stranded in hand exactly like its pumpless ancestors; the scry rider buys you flexibility, not immunity from being dead. That is the quiet design lesson stapled to a humble card: pairing a marginal effect with cantrip-grade card selection raises the floor without erasing it, turning "sometimes useful" into "useful far more often," and for a one-mana instant the floor is most of what you are buying.