Can someone explain Banding to me?
Asked by Juddnasty 11 years ago
I have looked at a few sites and as a new playing jumping into commander I thought Unholy Citadel looked interesting for my monoB deck that has a number of legendary creatures but I am not sure I fully understand how attack and blocking works with it.
Basically, any number of creatures with banding and up to one creature without can form a 'band' when attacking or defending.
Every creature in an attacking band becomes blocked if any creature of the band is blocked.
If you attack in a band, you get to assign the damage of any blocking creatures however you want among the attacking creatures.
If you defend in a band, you get to pick the damage assignment order of the attacking creatures instead of your opponent.
December 6, 2013 9:32 p.m.
I'll try to explain as best as I can, banding is a pretty old mechanic xD
ATTACKING:
Banding is an ability that activates during the combat phase. It essentially allows multiple creatures to attack/block as if they were one creature rather than multiple ones. In your case with Unholy Citadel , all your black creatures with the Legendary supertype gain the banding ability with OTHER Legendaries. You can band Ashling, the Extinguisher with Erebos, God of the Dead for instance. In your case, you can band all of your Legendary creatures together because you stated you're running a mono-black deck (which I tend to favor myself). If you're attacking (or in some cases blocking), just remember: If one or more creatures in the band has an ability such as Flying, but at lease one creature in the band lacks said ability, the entire band can be blocked as if it didn't have Flying. So you have to be careful.
BLOCKING:
Say your opponent attacks with 2 of his creatures. You decide to block each of them separately. If one of your creatures has banding, you can't split the combat damage between the banding creature and your other one because the two are blocking separately. If you blocked 1 of the attacking creatures with both of yours, you would be allowed to divide the combat damage up as you'd like.
I hope I helped!
December 6, 2013 9:35 p.m.
December 6, 2013 9:42 p.m.
Don't forget to select an answer to clear it out of the unanswered queue.
Juddnasty says... #1
as a new player*
December 6, 2013 8:55 p.m.