Icatian Phalanx

Banding is the most notoriously opaque keyword Magic ever printed, and a 2/4 Soldier is the purest distillation of what it was for. The mechanic's reputation rests on its offensive trick (an attacking band can hold any number of banding creatures plus up to one without, so a lone non-banding attacker rides along and the whole group moves and is blocked as one object), but the defensive clause is the quieter and more powerful half: when a creature with banding blocks, its controller assigns that attacker's combat damage instead of the attacker's controller. A four-toughness body can wall off an attacker, soak the hit, and dictate where the damage lands when several blockers gang up on a single threat, which turns a stack of small blockers into a precise removal engine rather than a chump-block lottery. The high toughness relative to the modest power is the tell: this was never meant to trade in combat, it was meant to survive it and rewrite the math. Banding's rules burden eventually got it filed away as a design dead end, a keyword Wizards stopped printing because explaining the damage-assignment reversal to a new player cost more than the effect was worth. What remains shows why some elegant-on-paper mechanics never survive contact with an actual rules manual: a card that lives entirely inside its keyword, back when combat tricks were stapled to creatures rather than cast from hand.