Lifelink a static ability that modifies the result of damage
It may not look as powerful until you realize you can cheat a Jumbo Cactuar into play and deal thousands of damage to other players, just by tapping your commander
There are some alternative win conditions like milling, which involves forcing your opponent to exhaust all of the cards in their deck, or Twenty-Toed Toad (BLC-051), which gives you a win with 20 counter tokens or cards in your hand
this can be your Oracle, or a Thoughtseize to set up the combo, or Force of Will to protect it
I am a math major and can reverse-engineer the data to perform an analysis: I only looked between Prismatic and Surging because that reduces minuscule inter-set variability, and Surging is basically dead-set on the average for post-Temporal data
when Banding itself is already a mechanic that's not the most popular or useful