Look, as a self-proclaimed Johnny and someone who likes to look outside of the box, there’s nothing more “Outside” the box than Ante! Ante is basically a non-starter for folks.

I get ante. I know this first hand. As you might recall, there was a popular casual format in the pre-Commander days called Five Color that was all the rage. Five Color’s rules were simple — 250 cards, at least 18 cards of each color. It had its own banned and restricted list and it allowed Ante. That’s it. Pretty simple.

And the Ante was something it embraced. Contract from Below was the most iconic card from the format. One year the annual Magic Invitational final was a Five Color final; and, to represent the Ante aspect of 5C, they allowed a rule stating the winner of the match would be the one who took the most money in Ante’s won. (The person who won used Jeweled Bird in the Final match to swap out his expensive ante, and then conceded to prevent any more ante tampering and won the match. He won by conceding, since the ante from his victory was worth more than the Bird and the ante lost).

Don’t forget Magic shipped with Ante as part of the initial repertoire of mechanics. Ante was a key part of the game. Flip over the top card of your deck, and the winner gets to keep the Ante. There were a lot of important things Ante did for folks. Ante is designed as a brake on the game. It keeps players from getting too attached to those powerful Moxes or Black Lotus. That was a powerful tool in the early game, but it’s gone now. I have to wonder if Eternal Masters would have been needed and if cards would have record values in the three and four digits if Ante were still legal.

Anyways, Five Color has evolved a few Ante rules to make it fairer. You don’t want James to Ante a Swamp when Helen was putting up a Skullclamp or Cursed Scroll or something. So the format created some fair Ante rules. Here they are.

5C Ante Rules

5-Color matches may be played for Ante. All antes are handled in the following manner: “Shuffle the library. After an opponent cuts the deck, the top card is revealed.

The following non-proxy cards are automatically accepted as Ante:

1. Non-land rare
2. Non-land foil
3. Any Non-land DCI Promo (Arena, FNM, Judge, Player Rewards, etc)
4. Any 5-Color Promotional Card
5. Any Non-land "Time Shifted" Purple card

In addition, a player may choose to accept any card that would normally not stop Ante.

Repeat this process until a card is accepted as Ante automatically or by an opponent. Shuffle the unaccepted cards into the library

So there you have it. Basically any promo, foil, rare, purple card stopped the Ante. (Lands tend to be exempt for mana making purposes). And of course, you can force the Ante to stop. It’s wouldn’t normally stop on an uncommon Sensei's Divining Top, but you certainly could. I think that’s a fair way to do Ante.

Now Five Color players, and lots of other folks, often play for Antes that aren’t true “Take your card” style Ante.

Here are some antes I know folks played for instead:

Ashnod's Coupon — The loser buys the winner a drink.

Ghost Ante — No cards are actually lost, the Ante just represents the various benefits discussed below.

Graffiti Ante — The winner gets to draw on, sign, and otherwise mark up the Anted card.

One Dollar Ante — The winner gets a buck.

Rare Ante — The winner gets a pull from the loser’s rare box — often this was chock full of those bad and bulk rares no one wants.

So let’s talk about the bear in the room. Ante itself. Why would you ever want to bring Ante back? What is Ante, truly?

Hey, Ante kept people out of Five Color. Even with optional Ante, or suggested Antes like those above, it’s still a dirty word in Magic. It closed doors. What happened?

Remember, I was on the Rules Committee for the 5-Color format for years and years, and was one of the longest standing members. I pushed to get Ante pulled from the format, but that failed. I didn’t have the votes. So my next plan was simple. Restore Ante to its original form.

See, the format wanted to have its cake and eat it too when it came to Ante. They allowed Ante, and even allowed powerful Ante cards to be played, like Contract from Below. But they disallowed cards like Darkpact. So, I argued all the ante cards on the banned list at the time should come off.

Why?

Well it’s simple actually. See, the main argument for keeping the very overpowered and format-warping Contract from Below was you Anted another card. You weren’t guaranteed a win after Contracting. You might lose that card! Sure, you might, but most decks had built in ante-stoppers (foil commons of low value, bulk rares, etc) reducing your chance of getting a major card, and when you Contract, your likelihood of losing is much, much lower. So that defense, of raising another card for Ante in exchange for a new hand is pretty weak in actual play. But folks are who folks are. So if we pull off Darkpact, then suddenly that weakness is really a weakness. I can steal the card you ante’d either normally or with Contract and Darkpact. Even if I lose, I got the card. Contract’s Ante becomes an actual risk.

That didn’t pass either. But you get the point. Ante has a value.

Ante is a brake.

Anteing a card up means you are risking losing it permanently. Imagine your next casual night. You tell everyone you’ll be playing for hardcore Ante. Commander and Ante. So everyone comes with decks ready for Ante-ing, and you change the Antes to reflect the above rules from 5-Color

Get ready for your Ante night!

What would the decks look like?

They’d probably run efficient, cheap, cards such as Emperor Crocodile, Serra Angel, Angel of Deliverance, and so forth. Whatever they had laying over in their trade pile or their bulk box. Cheaper cards might make the cut — Peregrination over Cultivate, Firebolt over Lightning Bolt, Murder over Hero's Downfall, and more. You get the idea.

Would they run Sol Ring? If they have 30 from the various Commander decks, sure. What about other cards? The only card exempt from Ante is the Commander, so you can still have your pimped out leader, and there would be no pressure to run a deck which doesn’t fit your flavor or playstyle.

Wouldn’t that be an interesting change up? Wouldn’t running decks with a bunch of disposable cards be a fun challenge? Wouldn’t that help to bring people to the same financial ladder, where decks costing around $1000 aren’t fighting those that are $33.55?

Don’t forget, you don’t even need to run full on Ante to make these changes. What if you did the defacing ante instead? Where folks could write their name and how they beat you on the card you Anted. No one wants a marked up Tundra! So all of the sudden you have the same cards being run and you are building up stories.

Shoot, I had a sleeveless 5-Color deck where I used to keep track of my kills by putting tick marks on the cards which defeated a player. I also wrote down major cards that my stuff killed. So my White-bordered Divine Offering had “Jittex2” and “Disk” written on it. I wish I could find it to show you a picture! (But I just moved to Mobile, Alabama. Things are packed and all over the place right now. Can’t track it).

Ante leads to stories. Defacing cards leads to stories. Stories compel. “How did your Blastoderm get that black smiley face?” “Why does your Atog have a pirate patch, parrot on its shoulder, and a pirate hat on its head?”

At a time when some cards and decks have rising and spiking prices, and at a time where no matter how many reprints, there are tons of casual and tournament cards with prohibitive prices, Ante and the changes it brings (even just a simple defacing Ante) have a compelling argument to make. At least as consideration for a change.

I think Demonic Attorney should be allowed in non-Ante matches. That’d be fun. Imagine dropping the Attorney and force everyone to Ante during your next Commander match. Sure, they might not have played Ante before, but they are now! That’d be a fun way to dial back the Commander terrors of folks with $1750 card decks layered with the dual lands, fetch lands, and cards worth hundreds of dollars each.

Obviously, I‘m kidding there a little. But just a little. (Oh, and for the fairness of full disclosure, I have a Commander deck that is worth that much money easily. I can be part of the problem. I admit it.)

Another interesting thing if you allow Ante is the addition of some cards to your deck-building radar.

So for that Commander/Ante night, here are some cards you’d look at:

Contract from Below. Duh. It’s the most powerful card drawing spell of all time. Seven cards: 1 mana. It makes Ancestral Recall look like Inspiration by comparison. Only two restrictions apply — the Ante, and discarding your hand. As long as you have a format full of cheaper, disposable cards, and a format which is self-restricting, like Commander where Contract is already restricted, then you’re good to go.

If you have never played Contract from Below in your entire life, then you need to change that forthwith. There’s just this dirty little Spike feeling you get when you play it. Everything is right and wrong at the same time. And getting a non-Beta/Alpha version is very, very cheap. So play your disposable Commander with a Contract.

While Ante cards like Amulet of Quoz and Rebirth probably aren’t hot on anyone’s shopping list, there are a few to mention.

Take Bronze Tablet. It’s like an old, sexy Desert Twister. You spend 4 mana to tap and then exile it and a target permanent your foe has. Both are exiled, and your foe can spend ten life to end it there. If they don’t, then you swap control of the Tablet and their card permanently. So, people usually would spend the life, right? Right! 10 life, and you have exiled their card — a healthy investment for your card. Now don’t forget you cannot pay life you do not have. If someone has less than ten life, then they can’t pay, and the Tablet is a guaranteed stealer of their permanent. Now, if they have less than ten life, they certainly can concede prior to Bronze Tablet resolving, in which case they’d lose the game and their own initial Ante, so there’s definitely a cost attached, but that’d be fun.

On a similar note, grab Tempest Efreet (get the rare from Legends, it’s fun, and still mega-cheap.) Tap and sacrifice it to steal a card from your enemy’s hand. In fact, the stolen card goes into your hand, so you can cast it. They can spend 10 life to stop it. I actually built a Five Color deck once that was built around Tempest Efreet and Dance of Many. I’d drop the Dance of Many, use it to make a token/clone of the Efreet, and then sacrifice the token to steal a card from my opponent’s hand (or to force them to pay 10 life instead). When I did that, sometimes they’d want the actual token, so I just used a penny as my token, and then gave it to them. Don’t spend it all in one place!

Ante has a lot of fun applications.

Ante forces decks built around one card and tutoring for that card (such as Cabal Coffers) to rethink that strategy. What if you Ante that card?

What if you have a combo with a bunch of needed parts, and you ante one of those pieces?

There are also some extremely good applications for it in limited universes. I want to write a future primer to explore limited universes in more depth for the modern Magic audience who may be largely unfamiliar with them. They are basically a limited and self-contained universe where you only have certain cards you can use for your decks, and you can trade or Ante as your only way to acquire more cards for your decks.

Sure, Ante might be a dirty word to a lot of folks, but so what? What would really be hurt with a special Ante Commander night? Or an Ante, 60-card casual fun time night? Why not try it out and see what there is to see. Besides, don’t you really want to cast Contract from Below?

Get your Contract on! (You know you want to!)