Mountain Stronghold

Banding with other legendary creatures could only have come from the original Legends file: a static effect, stapled to a land that costs nothing to play, that retrofits one of Alpha's most baroque combat keywords onto a specific creature subset that barely existed yet. The card is solving a problem the set was inventing in real time. Legends introduced the legendary supertype and a small roster of color-aligned legends to hang it on; this is one of five lands (one per color) that exist to make those legends interact on the battlefield, in this case by granting your red legendaries the ability to band with any other legendary creature, attacking or blocking as a group with the band's owner dividing the relevant combat damage. The mechanical payoff is narrow to the point of theoretical: you need a red legendary plus another legendary in play, a combat step where banding's damage-division rules actually matter, and an opponent who lets the situation develop. What it represents is more interesting than what it does. This is a snapshot of a moment when Wizards built whole subsystems for archetypes that did not yet have enough cards to support them, trusting that future sets would fill in the lattice. They mostly did not. The legendary banding lands are now an artifact of a road not taken, preserved on the Reserved List, doing the work of historical documentation more than gameplay.