Kjeldoran Knight

Banding is the keyword that taught a generation of judges to dread combat math, and this pump knight is built to weaponize the worst of it. When a creature with banding blocks an attacker, its controller (not the attacker's controller) chooses how that attacker's combat damage is distributed, which is most lethal when the knight blocks alongside other creatures: it can shove all of the incoming damage onto a single throwaway blocker and keep the rest of the wall intact, or pile it onto one creature to guarantee a trade. The two firebreathing-style activations turn that tactical edge into a real threat: spend white pips to push power and punch through a clog, or spend them to pad toughness and survive the swing back, all while banding rewrites who actually dies in the exchange. Both pumps compete with the rest of your curve for those pips, so winning a single combat step means surrendering a turn of board development; that tax is what keeps a 1/1 from running away with games. This is a clean artifact of how 1990s white wanted to fight: not by going wide or flying over, but by planting itself in the way and dictating the terms of every block. Banding promised tactical depth and delivered rules complexity the design team eventually concluded was not worth the cognitive overhead, and the keyword has been effectively retired from new printings ever since.