Kjeldoran Skyknight

Flying and first strike read as a clean evasive body, but the banding clause is the design that dates this card. Banding lets you group attackers into a single block-as-a-group unit and, crucially, lets you reassign the blocked or blocking creature's combat damage to your own creatures rather than letting the opponent choose. In practice that turns this into a combat-math toy: a way to absorb a big attacker onto a band and direct its damage where you want it instead of where it hurts. The problem was always parsing it. Banding's damage-assignment rules were dense enough that they confused players for years, and Wizards eventually stopped printing the keyword entirely, treating it as a complexity dead end rather than a mechanic worth iterating on. What survives is a snapshot of how white once wrote its combat tricks: baked into static abilities on creature bodies instead of spelled out on instants you could read and resolve in a beat. The 1/1 flying first-striker for three was never the draw; the banding text was, and the banding text is exactly why a card built this way would not clear a modern design review.