Soraya the Falconer

Two of Magic's least supported pillars meet on one 2/2 body: a Bird tribe the game never seriously committed to, and banding, the Alpha-vintage combat keyword so baroque in its rules that Wizards eventually stopped printing it entirely. The static half is the anthem, giving Birds +1/+1 while offering no way to actually make any. The activated half is where the design quirk lives: for one and a white, a target Bird gains banding until end of turn, turning a static keyword into a tactical resource you spend mana on. The payoff is that combat-damage assignment inverts. When a banding creature is blocking or being blocked, the player controlling it divides the opposing creature's damage rather than that creature's controller, so a defender who blocks an attacking band takes over how the attacker's damage is dealt out. Granting it on demand rather than baking it in is the part worth lingering on; banding becomes something you deploy in a specific combat step instead of a property your board simply has. Built on a tribe with almost no contemporaries and a mechanic with a hard expiration date, Soraya plays like an artifact of a set still working out what a coherent tribal payoff was supposed to look like.