Kjeldoran Phalanx

Banding is the rule text everyone points to when they want to prove that early Magic asked too much of its players, and this card stacks it on top of first strike, the one keyword that turns banding from a curiosity into something genuinely abusive. Read the reminder text closely: when a creature with banding blocks or is blocked, you (not that creature's controller) assign the combat damage of the creature it's blocking or being blocked by. Pair that with first strike and a 2/5 body and the math gets ugly for the opponent. The phalanx hits first, you choose to dump all of an attacker's incoming damage onto a single chump rather than spreading it, and the first-strike damage has often already removed the threat before it ever swings back. A wall-class toughness of 5 means it survives most of what a 1995 board could throw at it, so it sits in front of a band and rewrites every combat step it touches. The design is a defensive piece that wins fights it should lose by controlling information the attacker normally controls. Banding was eventually retired as an evergreen mechanic precisely because interactions like this one are nearly impossible to teach from the card face, and the keyword reminder text ballooned to accommodate them. As a relic, the phalanx demonstrates what the rule actually did when it worked: not a vanilla soldier, but a combat-math engine wearing a soldier's body.