Helm of Chatzuk

An artifact built to dispense a keyword whose reminder text runs longer than most whole cards. Banding is the famous example of early Magic shipping a mechanic that rewrote combat from the ground up: the attacking player declares a band, the defending player still chooses how to block but must block the band as a group, and the crucial inversion is the damage assignment. When banding creatures are tangled up in combat, the banding player divides their opponent's combat damage, not its controller. The Helm gives any creature access to that combat-math inversion for a turn, repeatably, off an artifact that costs one to cast and one to activate. That is a remarkable design posture: the card itself is small, but what it does to the combat step is structural. It turns a vanilla beater into a damage-assignment puzzle, and it lets a defending player interpose a banding creature to redistribute incoming damage onto a token or a blocker that does not mind dying. The mechanic was retired from the design palette early on (it sat poorly with later rules cleanups and confused nearly every player who encountered it), which fixed the Helm permanently as a fossil of a discarded combat model. Reading it now is reading a draft of a Magic the game eventually decided it could not afford to keep.