Benalish Infantry

Banding is the keyword that taught a generation of players to fear the rules text more than the creature, and a body like this one is its natural home. The mechanic does two separate things stapled into a single word: it lets a band of attackers be blocked only as a group, and it hands the banding player control over how a blocking or blocked creature's combat damage gets divided. That second clause is the real engine. A 1/3 body costs almost nothing on rate, but ganging it into a block alongside a beefier creature lets you assign all of the attacker's damage to the toughness you can spare while your hitters survive to deal theirs. The defensive stat line is the point: this is a creature designed to absorb and redirect, not to trade. Banding was eventually retired from new design because the rules overhead was indefensible (it interacts with damage assignment in ways that genuinely confused judges and players alike), which leaves cards like this as artifacts of an era when White's combat tricks were baked into static keywords rather than spells. Read it not as a soldier but as a damage-allocation tool with a 1/3 attached: the friction it creates in combat math is the whole reason it was printed.