Chimzar - Designing Ante, Part 2

Last time I spoke on the basics of ante (seen here).  This time, I’ll be talking about designing ante cards.  In my designs I have found there are two main types of ante cards, normal cards with an ante twist and the scary good cards (like this one).  Sorry, but I am leaving the scary good to next time.

Normal with an ante twist seems easy, but understanding its true cost is more difficult than it seems.  Paying mana or life is a simple to understand value.  Take Snuff Out for instance.  I can pay 4 life or 3B to kill a nonblack creature.  As a designer, I can easily see the cost and its effect on the game.  With ante, however, it can be much harder to see.  Take this example:

White loves to have low cost exiling removal with an added twist, but how is ante judged?  Mechanical, you are exile the top card of your library to exile a creature.  That by itself would be the best removal ever.  However, the chance of losing another card is there and that is where value is uncertain.  What if you just anted a Black Lotus?!  Seriously, what anteing a card does is literally up the stakes of the game.  The more cards you have in the ante the more you want to win, the more you are willing to sacrifice to win.  Ante cards should be the best at what they do, because by playing them the player is saying “I want to win at the cost of losing more cards if I don’t win.”

One important aspect of ante is the loss of control.  All of my normal ante cards have an element of unpredictability of what you could lose.  Ante is gambling and should feel like gambling.  What makes it interesting is how a player can manipulate his or her odds.

I’ve tried to showcase different aspects of ante in this uncommon cycle.  The key is they are very powerful and should help you win, but if you don’t, you are set to lose even more.  I hope you have enjoyed ante so far and I look forward to next time when ante goes crazy!