Volunteer Reserves

Two mechanics that modern design quietly retired share the same 2/4 body, and they pull against each other on purpose. Banding is the famously baroque combat keyword from the game's earliest sets, the one whose rules text reads like a contract clause: it lets a defending player seize damage assignment from the attacker, which on a sturdy wall turns blocking into a tax on the opponent's entire attack. Cumulative upkeep is the timer working the other direction, a self-imposed cost that compounds turn after turn until the bill outruns what you can pay. The intent is legible: banding wants the creature to stay on the board warping combat math, and cumulative upkeep insists you cannot keep it there for free. The two clauses argue by design. What fixes it as an artifact of its era rather than a build-around is that both mechanics fell out of favor: banding for being a rules-parsing nightmare, cumulative upkeep for asking players to pay a recurring tax on permanents they already cast, a friction modern design largely abandoned. The result is an honest snapshot of mid-90s white commons, when a defensive body came bundled with downside riders that demanded you parse three sentences to understand a creature that fought no harder than its frame suggested.