Nature's Blessing

A discard-fueled pump engine from the era when banding still sat on the menu of combat keywords a designer could hand out. The activated ability is repeatable but never cheap: each use demands and a discarded card, converting your hand into either a permanent +1/+1 counter or a chosen combat keyword. That double cost is the whole point. The colored-mana requirement caps how many times the engine can fire in a turn, so it is a slow-grind value sink rather than a burst threat: you feed it lands you no longer need and dead cards, but only at the rate your mana allows. The keyword menu is what dates it. First strike and trample have aged into evergreen staples, but banding is a combat rule almost no card touches anymore, and offering it alongside the others marks this as a product of mid-90s combat vocabulary, when Wizards still expected players to learn the keyword rather than treat it as a relic. Banding inverts who assigns damage: when a creature with banding blocks or is blocked, its controller takes over the division of the opposing creature's combat damage, spreading that attacker's or blocker's hits across the band however they like. That kind of intricate combat-math wrinkle is exactly what the early sets leaned into and later design largely abandoned for clarity. It captures green-white's "build a wide, hard-to-block board" identity at a moment when that identity was still being assembled out of parts since retired.