Jabari's Banner

An artifact built around a keyword that already lived on a single warband of creatures: flanking, the Mirage-block mechanic where an unflanked blocker takes -1/-1 for daring to step in front. The novelty here is granting that keyword to anything, on demand, for one mana and a tap. Flanking was conceived as a fixed property of certain bordered-and-bannered Zhalfirin soldiers, a passive edge that made their attacks awkward to block; this Banner unbundles the keyword from the creature and turns it into a repeatable combat trick, letting any attacker punish a blocker the same way the original flanking creatures did. The trouble is that flanking only does work on the attack, and only against a blocker without flanking of its own, so the activation has to be timed into a combat where the opponent is committed to chump-blocking or stacking blockers on a single threat. That narrow window is the design discipline keeping a cheap, repeatable effect honest: it does nothing on defense, nothing against an empty board, and nothing against fellow flankers. It reads as a flavor object first, a piece of Zhalfir's martial heraldry made into equipment-adjacent hardware before equipment existed, and a curiosity for anyone interested in how early sets experimented with detaching keywords from the bodies that introduced them.