Pikemen

The combination here is sharper than the body suggests. Banding's defensive trick is that when a banding creature blocks, its controller (not the attacker's) assigns that attacker's combat damage among the blockers. So a 1/1 here can choose to soak a much larger creature's damage and decide exactly where it lands. Pair that with first strike and the math turns against the attacker: in a band, these creatures deal their first-strike damage in an earlier step, and only the survivors of that exchange divide up the attacker's return damage. A defender can engineer the blocks so the band kills or cripples the attacker while losing as little as possible, and a lone attacker often comes out worse for having swung at all. Banding was the most notoriously dense ruleset of the game's early years, the keyword that taught a generation of judges to dread combat questions, and it was retired from new design precisely because the damage-assignment reversal it grants was both powerful and nearly impossible to parse at the table. This card sits in the small cluster of designs that married banding to first strike, the pairing that exploited the rules to their fullest: the band controls the kill, and first strike means the band rarely pays full price for it. It comes from a stretch of Wizards' design when elegance and power were still treated as the same thing, and it shows how a two-mana common could quietly demand a rules lecture every time it entered combat.