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Moxonomy

Wall of Caltrops

Creature — Wall1 generic manaWhite mana

Banding-on-a-trigger is the design curio worth pausing on. Most Legends-era banding lived on the card as a static keyword, which meant the damage-division trick was always available but always obvious: opponents simply refused to attack into the bander. Here, the keyword arrives only when two Walls gang-block the same creature with no help from anything else, which is a remarkably specific puzzle to solve for two mana and a 2/1 body that cannot attack. The reward, when you do solve it, is the defender's grail: the ability to soak a large attacker with a chump and assign the lethal damage to the bigger Wall, keeping your blocker alive. The card is a thesis statement for a Wall-tribal deck that Legends gestured at but never quite delivered, and the trigger structure (conditional on a fellow Wall, spoiled by a non-Wall blocker) reads as an early attempt to gate a powerful combat-math ability behind a tribal commitment rather than a mana cost. The mechanic has aged into near-illegibility: banding's damage-division rules are some of the most-errata'd text in the game, and a Wall that conditionally gains banding is a sentence that asks the modern reader to consult two separate rulebooks. As a design artifact, though, it captures Legends in miniature: a strange idea, gated by a stranger condition, printed at common.

Wall of Caltrops (leg)
LEG · #42common
Pricing
Normal: $1.03
Foil:
Oracle Text

Rules text

Defender (This creature can't attack.) Whenever this creature blocks a creature, if at least one other Wall creature is blocking that creature and no non-Wall creatures are blocking that creature, this creature gains banding until end of turn. (If any creatures with banding you control are blocking a creature, you divide that creature's combat damage, not its controller, among any of the creatures it's being blocked by.)
Legalities

Format Status

Standard
N/A
Pioneer
N/A
Modern
N/A
Legacy
Legal
Vintage
Legal
Commander
Legal
Pauper
Legal
Brawl
N/A
Historic
N/A
Alchemy
N/A
Timeless
N/A
Standard Brawl
N/A
More formats
Old School
Legal
Premodern
N/A
PreDH
Legal
Pauper Commander
Legal
Oathbreaker
Legal
Gladiator
N/A
Penny Dreadful
N/A
Duel Commander
Legal
Future Standard
N/A
COMPETITIVEBRAWL
N/A
TLR
Legal
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