Errand of Duty
A two-mana instant that makes a single 1/1, this is the kind of card that only makes sense once you remember what banding was supposed to do. Banding was Alpha's attempt at a deep combat-puzzle keyword: a creature with banding lets its controller assign the blocked or blocking creature's damage instead of the opponent, which turns a token like this into a damage-redirection valve in the combat math. Playing it at instant speed is the entire point. You hold up the mana and drop the Knight in before blockers are declared, ambushing an attacker by changing who eats the lethal damage, or chumping in a way that lets a bigger creature survive the trade. That is a genuinely interesting trick on paper. In practice, banding is one of the most opaque rules templates the game ever shipped, dense enough that it was retired from new design and never returned, and the effect it delivers does not justify spending a card and two mana to produce a vanilla-sized body. The historical curiosity is that Wizards thought combat granularity this fiddly belonged at instant speed as a build-around: a removal-adjacent tempo play disguised as a token maker. It reads today as an artifact of an era still figuring out how much rules complexity a single keyword could carry, and where the line between depth and friction actually sat.
