Veteran Guardmouse

Valiant is the mechanic that pays you for aiming spells at your own creatures, and this is the archetype's clean anchor: a 3/4 body that already survives most early combat, priced with a hybrid pip so it slots into either half of the red-white aggressive plan. The strength is in the combat math the trigger produces. First strike on what becomes a 4/4 means the mouse wins the fight it swings into and dodges the trades a vanilla midsize body would lose. Because the ability wakes up the first time you spend a target on it in a turn, any cheap pump spell, any tapper, any protective instant adds a combat swing on top of its printed effect, and the +1/+0-and-first-strike bundle is calibrated so a single pinger or a one-mana trick makes it a genuine threat rather than a marginal one. The Scry 1 rides inside that same trigger, which is the detail worth stressing: it fires only when you actually engage the mouse with a spell or ability, so the smoothing is a reward for playing forward, not a free upkeep effect. What balances the design is the cap of one trigger per turn. You cannot chain targets to run the power up without bound, so the card rewards spreading spells across a board rather than dumping everything on one attacker, which is exactly the texture a go-wide aggressive deck wants.