See Blue/Red keyword ability.

Izzet evergreen mechanic.

Primary , secondary

Wait, this seems to have both range which seems like an interesting soft-of-first-strike-but-sort-of-not defensive mechanic - but also banding?

Do you have any plans here as to how to avoid the issues of banding?

"As a band" doesn't tell much to those unfamiliar with the mechanic and even those who do, don't know what it exactly means.

Yeah, the answer is "don't use more complicated versions of failed mechanics as evergreen"

Why does this even use band terminology? Isn't the second half the whole feature? Rigt now I can see why I would want a creature with the second half of the ability (effectively first strike), but there is not a single mention of what attacking as a band does good.

You literally could remove the first half of the reminder text and have a card that is identical functionally, right?

I think just comprules of: Blockers may only assign damage to creatures with range after assigning to all attacking creatures without it; should do the job.

The shorter reminder text should probably be "Creatures with range are blocked last"

It seems like it's a fun combat condition, it's got flavour - and it fits the colour!

But.. how often will it ever actually come up? You'd need to give it to the creature that wants to be blocked first (So high power - which, uh, rules out almost all blue creatures) and doesn't have other evasion. And then there has to be some kind of attacking wall that they would normally not bother blocking and they have to have few enough blockers for the difference to matter... I worry that it's niche enough to just not pay off very often.

Is this a more complicated way of getting something that is approximately similar to:

> Sneaky (This creature can only be blocked by creatures that could not block another creature.)

? For both of these abilities it is really weird to give the two "spell colors" a shared keyword ability that requires multiple creatures to do anything.

Not quite; the intention is you have to deal damage to those in the front row, before those in the back row.

Which feels like a thing blue should be down with (evasion) and red should be down with (we're the front row!). But mechanically, clunks.