Kjeldoran Skycaptain
A flying creature with banding is a quietly strange object, because banding's combat-damage assignment rules were written with ground combat in mind and never sit cleanly on top of evasion. The keyword stack here is doing three jobs at once: flying decides who can block it, first strike decides who survives the exchange, and banding hands you control over how a blocker's damage gets distributed when it attacks or blocks alongside your other creatures. That last clause is the one carrying the weight, and also the reason cards like this read as relics: banding is the most rules-dense keyword the game ever shipped, requiring players to track a damage-assignment privilege that no modern keyword preserves. The body itself is plain, and is steep for what a 2/2 does in the air. The card is a snapshot of early design philosophy, when complexity was layered onto creatures through stacked keywords rather than through enters-the-battlefield triggers or activated abilities. Banding was a deliberate experiment in giving the attacker (or the blocking player) a measure of combat control that the rules normally reserve for the other side, and a flying banding creature is the purest demonstration of how awkwardly that experiment scaled. Wizards eventually stopped printing banding entirely, which makes every creature carrying it a small museum piece of the era when combat math was the puzzle the game asked you to solve.


