Teremko Griffin

Banding is the rules text that scared off a generation of judges, and pairing it with flying is where the mechanic gets genuinely strange. The combat-damage assignment clause is the heart of it: when a creature with banding blocks or is blocked, you (not your opponent) decide how that attacker or blocker spreads its damage among the creatures it touches. Most banding lived on the ground, where stacking a band let you choose which of your blockers ate the damage and gun for a favorable trade. Stapling that to evasion means a 2/2 body for four mana can dictate the math of an aerial fight, deciding which flyer absorbs an incoming attacker's damage even though it never leaves the air. The body is unremarkable on purpose; banding's value was never in stats but in the way it inverted the basic assumption of combat, that the attacking player chooses how their creatures deal damage. Wizards retired banding because the timing and assignment rules were a perennial source of misplays and table arguments, which makes a clean flying-and-banding creature a small artifact of a design era that was willing to ship complexity it would later decide it could not support.