Icatian Infantry

Both of this 1/1's combat tricks have to be bought rather than carried for free, which is the whole design statement: pay once for first strike to win an exchange it would otherwise lose, pay again for banding to seize control of how damage is divided when it attacks or blocks alongside other creatures. Banding is the more interesting half and the harder to use, because it hands damage-division authority to the player controlling the banding creature: an attacker pushing a band into a block decides how the blocker's damage is parceled out, and a blocker with banding does the same on defense. That turns a humble one-drop into a damage-assignment lever for the entire combat step. The cost discipline is the point: nothing here triggers for nothing, so the card's ceiling scales with how much mana you can spare, and a one-mana creature that wants two extra mana per turn to matter is firmly a creature of its time. Banding has long since been retired from new design as too complex to teach, which leaves cards built around it as artifacts of a mechanical dialect that no longer gets spoken: white once treated banding as ordinary vocabulary, and the activations stapled here are a fossil of that grammar rather than a template anyone reaches for now.