Pointed Discussion

Not bad if you have a few power- and toughness-boosters.

Thank god they got rid of banding. Horrible, horrible ability.

No it wasn't. Banding was awesome ability.

I'm glad it has firststrike.

This was my favorite white weenie back in the day. Banding and first strike are both good, unlike Benalish Hero or Tundra Wolves which only have one, and cheaper than Pikemen. Of course, you have to pay to get either ability, but that's OK, since both are only useful occasionally (though on those occasions, they're great). It's cheap and it's flexible.

So much effort to get it to do something, but at least it was a 1/1 for W with abilities.

Banding was remarkably useful, but it was absolutely confounding to deal with.

For those who do not understand banding or whine about it, it was a fantastic ability. Was it a bit convoluted, sure, but it definitely kept a super big creature from rampaging someone with small creatures.
This is definitely a good 4 star card - minimum.

I happen to love banding, It was a cool ability if a bit tricky to use and understand.

Banding is soooooooooooooo awful. Thank god it's gone.

No wonder Icatia was utterly defeated. A typical infantry man had a p/t of .33333.

had to chuckle at the ruling "creatures in the same band must all attack the same player or planeswalker." hey, i'm sure it's happened once or twice in the history of casual magic.
banding is not at all a bad ability, it was just an overly-ambitious rule for alpha. if they'd waited a few years and called it something more flavorful ('fellowship', or 'bloodbond', or 'unity' maybe) you'd all be spouting a million combos that would create third turn wins using it. i suspect wotc will eventually come up with a simpler, slightly more powerful version. sadly, this will not make my tolaria any more desirable to anyone.

Banding was a cool ability, but it was definitely convoluted. It would have been so much simpler to make it something like "Banding - tap: target creature gets +X/+Y, where X is this creatures power and Y is this creatures toughness." (They tried to do this to a small extent, see the comments on infantry veteran, but it wasn't done very well). They could have kept a lot of the same functionality with abilities like "sacrifice this creature: regenerate target creature this creature banded with this turn". Things like camel would still work: "prevent all damage dealt by deserts to creatures this creature banded with this turn".

Sure, this misses out on the evasion loss, damage allocation, and things like first strike, lifelink, etc, but those just added to the confusion. Everyone understood a band could deal the sum of everythings power in damage. They didnt get that you could put more than lethal damage on your 1/1 banding to save the rest of your band and hose trampling or that they could block an entire band as long as they could block 1 thing or that you needed all but 1 bander on offense, but only 1 bander on defense.

Banding had so many of its own rules that it needed to either be an extremely common ability or be simpler. As a somewhat rare ability in one color, it was just too confusing to keep. Sure, you understood it, but your opponent didn't.

HERE COME THE HUNKS!