Icatian Skirmishers
The attack trigger is the tell. Banding's combat-damage division already lets you, the attacking player, parcel out the blocker's damage among your band, and stacking first strike on top is meant to turn a clutch of fragile bodies into a wall of pre-emptive damage that resolves before any blocker swings back. The whole package is a four-mana 1/1 that does almost nothing alone and a great deal in formation, which is exactly the contradiction banding asked players to internalize: the stat line is a deposit against a combat-math payoff that only materializes when several creatures march together. That granted-first-strike clause is the same structural idea behind any "lord" effect that buffs a battalion, just routed through the most baroque combat rules the game ever shipped. Banding's reputation as a rules-comprehension black hole is earned, and cards like this are why; the keyword was retired from new design precisely because the damage-division clause demanded a paragraph of parenthetical explanation that most players read once and never again. What survives is a snapshot of a design philosophy that still believed a complicated combat subsystem could be a draw rather than a barrier, teaching one interaction at a time even at the rare slot, where the payoff for understanding it was supposed to feel earned.
