Pointed Discussion

*** Awesome

The cleavage undeniably proves that that is indeed a female.

Excellent with Deftblade Elite.

A must in any banding deck.

In my very first booster pack of revised, I pulled a Benalish Hero, a Serra Angel, and a Wrath of God.

@: Kataklyzmik
i guess you started playing white after that?

So if this card is banded with a 2/2 creature and I block with a 1/1 - I don't get to choose to kill off the 1/1 Benalish Hero card, the attack can say you deal 1 damage to my 2/2 creature and your guy dies??? Is that right!? Why does the attacking player get to control your damage assignment?? Is that just a bonus feature of banding? Seems a little powerful to me.

Also (another question) you can't instantly band two creatures to defend an attack right? You must choose to band in your main phases (not in combat) right?

hardly seems heroic to me...

She is a hero because she shirks damage off to her unwitting, so-called "allies."

Truly noble.

Banding sux

I guess theres a few combos that u can abuse with it, but...


If u band 5 creatures, u get chump blocked. Sweet.

So much better than Kjeldoran Warrior, even though it is a functional reprint, for being gender questionable...oh yeah, it's the original, too...

@TheWrathofShane
"If u band 5 creatures, u get chump blocked. Sweet."

Banding was never that awful. To make up a very simple example, if you've got a 3/3 and a Benalish Hero and your opponent has a 3/4, suddenly that banding looks pretty good since you'll either swing in for 4 or exchange a 1/1 for a 3/4.

Things like that won't come up that often, but things like cheap 0/3 banding creatures could be very useful. Of course, if you band 5 creatures against your opponent's chump blocker, you'll get blocked, but complaining about that is like complaining that if you attack with Loyal Sentry you'll get chump blocked; you're clearly not using the card very well.

Um you all realize this can block trample with no run through don't you?

"Banding has a complex rules system that changes with the lunar year..."

Banding was good on attack, as Lyoncet described, but even better on blocking. One example that actually happened to me: Opponent had an Order of Leitbur, and enough white mana to give it first strike and kill any of my creatures. So I blocked with a Hero and another creature: All the damage went to the Hero, which died, but the other creature was still fine to kill the Lite Beer.

Or, the more common situation: Use a whole bunch of blockers (only one needs to have banding for it to work) against a big creature, and either distribute the damage so that none of your creatures die, or if that's not possible, then dump it all on whichever creature you have that's least valuable at the moment.

Banding was great, and I'd love to see it return.

Oh, and it has to be said: She's got a sister named Bananalish Hero, who wears a Carmen Miranda hat, costs one yellow mana, and is 1/1 bunches.

I think I'll actually have a banding deck... This mechanic is getting nastier and nastier every time I look at it. A great trick is to have her attack with something you want to keep safe, and then have her take all the damage... It works rather nicely. And I think I'll combin it with taunting elf... Just to make things even more fun.

You know what irks me a little. They still treat Banding the same as combat damage before the m10 changes.

It amazes me how long Douglas Shuler was able to get away with artwork like this.

This is Sigourney Weaver.

Check out some of his other artwork and see how many famous celebrities you can spot.

Part of the reason Banding was so powerful, I have to admit, was because it was so complicated that my opponents often wouldn't realize what I could do with it and would make mistakes as a result.

But even against an opponent who understands it, banding is pretty powerful. Banding this with a 5/5 beatstick means an extra damage at least; if it's blocked by a 6/6, they're out their 6/6 blocker and you're out... your 1/1 one-mana drop. Blocking, it's even stronger.

For everyone wondering why older players mock banding so much despite it being somewhat understandable, it's because when we originally got these cards...THERE WAS NO INTERNET. The best we could have was a crappy Revised (or 4th Edition) mini-manual that came with a starter deck, and everyone lost those right after they got them.

So you had no source to double-check what banding was supposed to do, no frequently asked questions webpage to clarify it...and no reminder text on the card either. You just had to scratch your head and remember what you read in the manual, or trust one of your friends who claimed he knew (and told you something vague and crazy).

So the end result was that the word 'Banding" was an inscrutable word that translated to "don't put this in your deck." That's probably what most of us associate with the term.