Why was the banding ability 'removed' from MTG? What was so complicated about it?

Question

While the banding ability was never actually removed from the game, no cards have been printed that use the ability in any set following sixth edition and it has never appeared on any rules summary I've seen from the past several years. Why is this? I've heard it's because the ability was 'too complicated'. What exactly was so complicated about it that might have encouraged its extinction? What is a good situation/example that demonstrates why it was probably exiled from the game?

List of cards that reference the banding ability

Answer 1

Take it from the horse's mouth:

The short explanation of banding is that if your creatures attack or block in a band, the controller of any creatures that deal combat damage to them doesn’t get to assign that damage -- you do. Pretty cool. Everything else about banding, though, elicits a “huh?” It works differently when attacking and defending. (In an attacking band of X creatures, at least [X-1] of them must have banding. In a defending band, only one creature must have banding.) A lone blocker could block multiple creatures if they were banded together. If an attacker with evasion (flying, swampwalk, whatever) is banded to a creature without evasion, the whole band can be blocked. Then it gets really complex: What if the only defensive creature with banding is destroyed before damage is dealt? What if my band of three attacking creatures, one of which has trample, is blocked by your band of three defending creatures, one of which has first strike?

The only answer I can give you is, “I dunno.”

Banding was an ability that was flavorful and simple enough in the simple cases. But when you left the simple cases and got into more unusual situations, the rules suddenly became very complex, unintuitive, and opaque. You wind up with a mechanic that cannot be understood or accurately applied simply by reading the text on the card and applying your general rules knowledge. Instead, you have to know a whole bunch of banding-specific rulings, and hope you have a copy of the comp rules handy if it ever comes up.

And all of this complexity is maintained for a mechanic that rarely actually mattered. I could be wrong, but I don't believe there is any card with banding that has ever been a tournament staple. Under these conditions, the best choice is the one that Wizards made, which is to let banding lay fallow and pretend the whole thing never happened.

Answer 2

The current official reminder text for Banding is as follows:

Banding (Any creatures with banding, and up to one without, can attack in a band. Bands are blocked as a group. If any creatures with banding you control are blocking or being blocked by a creature, you divide that creature's combat damage, not its controller, among any of the creatures it's being blocked by or is blocking.)

Yes, it's taken them 20 years to distil the "simple explanation" of Banding into that - and I bet you still can't tell what it means without reading it slowly and carefully at least three times.

Wizards has made it a bit of a rule of thumb, for quite a few years now, to remove complexity from the game where it isn't needed. Could the game survive with Banding, Phasing, interrupts and mana burn still in it? Almost certainly. Is it better off without them? Again, almost certainly.

The real nail in Banding's coffin is that you can get a similar flavour out of a much simpler rule. Take for example the en-Kor ability from Stronghold:

0: The next 1 damage that would be dealt to [this en-Kor] this turn is dealt to target creature you control instead.

This does almost everything Banding did - gives the owner some power to control how damage is assigned to his creatures. But with the great advantage of not causing your head to explode while trying to calculate how it works in complicated situations!