Chimzar - Designing Ante, Part 1

Ante is dead.  Wizards will never bring it back.  Even though it saddens me, I have accepted this fact.  However, I'm not wizards and can make whatever I want!

The only format my roommate and I play together is Zen (aka Ante).  I believe we started with a starter deck of Time Spiral and some packs, but now we both have deck with hundreds and hundreds of cards from every set of magic.  Our deck building is a bit unorthodox to traditional Zen as we can add whatever cards we want.  How could I not add ante cards?!

The biggest issue with the ante cards of old is that many suck because they give players ways of not losing ownership of a card by paying some amount of life (Bronze Tablet, Tempest Efreet) or anteing another card (Amulet of Quoz,  Timmerian Fiends).  If you're going to play ante, you want play something scary good, like the best card ever made, Contract from Below.

Which leads us to new Ante.  Ante needs to become a Supertype so it can be easily identified and removed when not play for ante.  This also enable cards to target or count Ante cards, like Snow.  In turn, the text "Remove ~ from your deck before playing if you’re not playing for ante." would become reminder text.

The original designers did get somethings right.  Ante cards should be hard to cast, which often means they need to be color intensive.  Zen is played with all five colors and their mana availability widely varies.  It is a good rule of thumb that ante cards cost three of a single color or, if colorless, cost 6 or more.  This plays rather nicely and makes their occurrences more exciting.

I'll leave you today with one of my favorites and I look forward to showing off more next time.