Mtenda Herder

Flanking exists to fix a problem white aggression has always had: a 1/1 attacker is trivial to block, and a ground stall blunts cheap creatures faster than any other archetype. The keyword answers that by punishing the block itself. Any creature without flanking that declares against this one shrinks by a point in both dimensions, so a 2/2 blocker becomes a 1/1 and trades where it would normally have lived; a 2/1 dies before it deals damage; a chump-blocking 1/1 evaporates without taking the Herder with it. The kill is rarely the point. The penalty is combat friction: it taxes the defender into either taking the damage or committing a real body to stop a one-drop, and that tax compounds when the attacker costs a single mana. The trigger condition is where the work happens. Only blockers lacking flanking suffer, so flanking creatures pass through one another unharmed. The penalty also multiplies, but only when stacked on a single attacker (a second instance from something like Cavalry Master makes it -2/-2), not by fielding several flanking bodies at once. Mirage spread the keyword across its aggressive creatures to give early plays staying power against those ground stalls; the Herder sits at the cheapest, smallest end of that distribution, a baseline expression of the mechanic rather than a payoff for it.