Tolaria

The hate card buried in a mana producer. The blue ability is the obvious half: a tap-for-one source legendary enough to constrain how many copies a deck can run, the kind of utility land a mono-blue control deck might slot in just to round out its mana. The second ability is the artifact: dedicated banding hate, walled off behind an upkeep-only restriction so it cannot be deployed as a combat trick. Banding was a keyword Wizards was actively trying to make matter, and this card is built specifically to dismantle it, along with the white "bands with other" creatures it implicitly polices. It functions as a piece of internal balance: if you print a mechanic that lets attackers and blockers form combat groups with their own damage-assignment rules, you also print the lever that turns it off, and you tuck the lever onto a land so a deck does not have to bend its colors to reach it. The upkeep-only window is the discipline; it means the hate is preemptive, declared before combat math is even on the table, and it cannot be held up as a surprise during the attack step. A card that exists almost entirely to answer another card, from a period when Wizards still printed narrow, single-target answers as permanent infrastructure rather than disposable sideboard tech.