Pointed Discussion

Rated so low... you morons don't appreciate banding, do you? >_>

I do.

Question: Since this creature has flying, do the creatures that it bands with get flying if they do not have flying? Or can it only band wiht flying monsters?

That kind of question is why they got rid of banding, Mephilis.

While simple and intuitive in theory, the execution of banding is quite confusing at the beginning... I used to learn properly how to use this ability and I assure you that it's so powerful, specially at the defense!

Back to the question, Mephilis: no and no. The band can be of every kind of creature, but every creature have to have banding, except for at most one. Then the opponet can block the band with every creature that can block every single creature of the band. So the creature in the band doesn't share any ability, but instead they keep their abilities.

Example:
you attack me with a band composed by:
Mesa Pegasus, Noble Elephant, Pikemen and Dimir Cutpurse.
If I don't block, you deals me 6 damages and I discard and you draw a card, for the cutpurse.
If i block with a x/1 creature, during the first damage step (I don't recall exactly how it's called...) your pikemen deals 1 damage to my creature and my creature dies. Then, during the second damage step your elephant deals me 2 damages because it has trample, and the rest of the band doesn't deals any damage because the creature(s) blocking them is(are) not in play anymore. So you don't draw and I don't discard.
If I block with a 5/5, my creature survives the first strike damage, and then your band deals the non-first-strike damage to my creature. You can choose how the band deals its damage, so you can choose to assign the cutpurse and the pegasus damage to my 5/5 (for a total of 4 damages, considering the first strike damages), and then your trample elephant can deals 1 damage to the 5/5 (for a total of 5 damages) and 1 trampling damage to me.
Then my 5/5 deals 5 damages to the band, but you decide how to assign those damages... Maybe you decide to deals every 5 damages to the Mesa Pegasus, since its flying ability is revelant only if every creature of the band has flying. For example, a band with Mesa Pegasus and Air Elemental can be blocked only by flying creature...

See how every creature retains its ability, but they don't share them?

It's rated low because banding isn't so useful on 1/1 creatures, and unnecessary on flying creatures. Banding is less about combining strengths, and more about the advantage of distributing damage among your own creatures how you see fit. Banding is about losing the creatures you want to lose in combat, instead of your opponent making that decision as per the normal rules of the game. So, a 1/1 creature that bands can still only take 1 point of damage, it does nothing to absorb hit points that saves your creatures, unless you want the Pegasus, with flying evasion, to die. Banding needed creatures with high toughness so you could assign most of the damage to them and still keep most of your attackers and defenders. Icatian Phalanx is a creature that depicts the best form of what banding is meant for, damage absorption.

It's a moot point anyway as Banding isn't a worthwhile tool for a deck, I see it as severe card disadvantage. If a person has such a creature advantage that he/she can waste to combine 4 of them together for an assault that can be blocked by a single creature of the opponents, I think that's the opposite of what you want in an attack. Lure effects survived and Banding became extinct, it was good for the game that way.

I miss banding because you could get around trample damage and all kinds of other bad stuff that happens when some creatures hit you for combat damage (e.g. Hypnotic Specter) but the implications of static abilities are a bit complex. Having taken up the game when banding was alive and well for those who knew how to use it, I could see how it would be offputting to newer players.

@Mephilis
It's actually a pretty intuitive answer (believe it or not.) If anything in the band can be blocked, the whole band can be blocked. In physical terms it would be like a Mesa Pegasus flying along with a group of soldiers. It's not going to be able to fly high above the enemies and still coordinate with the soldiers below. It's going to have to go to the ground.

I really don't think Banding was as hard as people make it out to be. The problem was when they started spinning it off into "bands with dragons" and other specialized ones that interacted in really confusing ways with vanilla banding.

True story: my brother had so many of these that he made a deck of nothing but it and land.

And it beat my decks, time and time again.

The Oracle text guy forgot the most important and common question: what happens when Mesa Pegasus attacks or blocks with a non-flyer in a band? :-)

That awkward moment when the woman visits the land of the Mesa Pegasus, and the Pegasus doesn't appear.

To those who are asking questions about banding, read the rules.
For those of you who are considering adding the Pegasus to your deck, here's why its a good card:
Alone, Mesa Pegasus is pretty worthless (compared to Giant Spider orFlying Men ), but in combination with other cards the Pegasus can be pretty solid.
For one thing, Mesa Pegasus can fly, so it can attack with a fair chance of being unblockable. This alone makes it a crap Flying Men. However, as it has both flying and banding, you can use it very effectively against attacking flyers. You can band this card with other non-flyers and block (hopefully kill) a big flyer.
Banding is an ability that I always underestimated until I made a banding deck. I went with White (banders & swords) and Red (burn and things like Blood Lust, and the deck worked surprisingly well. The opportunities are endless. Banding is easy to misunderestimate.

@BonniePrinceCharlie: You're underestimating the advantage of directing all the damage to a 1/1 banding creature.

Consider this: If I band a Mesa Pegasus with a Serra Angel and attack with it, and you block with a Shivan Dragon (or vice-versa, if you attack and I block), no matter how much damage you pump into the dragon, I can dump it all onto the pegasus. That's the real advantage of banding: It lets you decide which of your creatures die, while putting them into bands big enough to force anyone who blocks or is blocked by them into an unfavorable trade-off (because anything that blocks or is blocked by the band is probably going to die itself.)

@The_Erudite_Idiot

"misunderestimate"

*twitch*

@ Aquillion
I can't tell you how many times that exact scenario played out in games I was playing in the mid-to-late 90's.

Unfortunately, with today's power creep and so many creatures with ridiculous P/T and game-changing abilities, both activated and otherwise, poor banding has simply been outclassed. Why woud WotC print banding when they can add words like deathtouch or double strike? I often miss the simpler days of Revised and a reasonable expansion here or there.