War Elephant

Banding's most honest expression: a four-mana 2/2 whose entire pitch is the interaction between its two keywords rather than the body carrying them. The trample-plus-banding stack is the design tell. Banding lets you, when a creature with banding you control is blocking or being blocked, assign how that creature's combat damage is divided; trample lets the attacker push damage past blockers. Weld the two onto the same Elephant attacking into a chump and you get a damage-assignment puzzle the defender cannot resolve cleanly, because the attacking side decides how trample overflow lands while the banding side dictates how the blocker's damage comes back. That is the whole reason the slot exists: not the 2/2, not the rate, but a rules interaction that rewarded players who had actually read the reminder text. Banding as a mechanic was retired from design largely because explaining it at a kitchen table took longer than playing the game it appeared in, and the keyword has been walled off from new design for most of Magic's life; cards like this are why the rules text now ships with parenthetical reminders longer than the ability itself. The Elephant creature type was barely a category in 1993, which makes this an accidental ancestor of a tribe that would not get real support until much later. The card's lasting interest is structural, not statistical: a snapshot of a moment when Magic would still price a creature around a keyword most players could not parse.