Baton of Morale

A colorless wrench built to sell one of the most baroque mechanics the game ever shipped: banding, the keyword whose reminder text runs longer than most cards' entire rules box. The pitch is a repeatable activation that hands banding to any creature, including ones that never had it, turning the combat-damage-assignment rules inside out for a turn. That is the function: banding lets the player controlling a banding creature that's blocking or being blocked, not the opposing controller, decide how a creature's damage gets divided among the creatures it's tangled with. So this artifact lets a deck import banding's blocking and damage-assignment tricks onto any board it can attack or defend with, then do it again next turn for two mana a pop. The mechanic proved too confusing to keep printing, which is why so few cards even reference it, and granting it on demand answers a question almost no deck is asking. Worse, it asks the whole table to relearn the most-litigated rules text in early Magic just to adjudicate a single combat step. Worth knowing as evidence of an era when colorless utility was willing to be this strange, and when the rules engine was loose enough to let a two-mana artifact reroute who assigns damage.