Chimzar - Designing Ante, Part 3

For the third installment of Designing Ante, the cuffs are off.  Having the high risk of actually losing ownership of cards allows designers to push the boundaries of power.  In this article I will be discussing the heightened power level, the importance of high risk and reward, and, most importantly, the excitement of playing ante cards.

Ante cards do extraordinary things.  They need to or players will play cards that have much less risk to them.  A good test for this is asking if this card is "Power 9" powerful.  A card that does the same thing as a Mox but also antes a card when it entered the battlefield would be on par with this idea.  Just like the "Power 9," ante cards need to improve you position as enablers.  When you have a Black Lotus on the battlefield, for a turn, you are ahead three turns.  That said, you can't win the game with just Black Lotuses.  Ante cards need to work the same way, by not winning the game for you, but instead setting your other cards up to win.  Keep in mind that Zen, the most common Ante format, is played with a very random assortment of cards of all colors, so higher power level cards that don't win the game themselves do not take the game over as effectively as one may think.

As a cost for crazy powerful abilities there also needs to be risks.  This includes exchanging cards, giving cards to opponents or anteing more cards.  Most often ante cards need to encourage their caster to win the game without guaranteeing it.  Cards that just take can really hurt the appeal of ante as it takes the randomness and sport out of the game.  You want players to win the cards not steal them.  Exchanging is much better as it may not be fair but at least they get something back and both players may not be completely happy.  Putting more cards in the ante adds more excitement as raising the stakes is positive both for the player getting the powerful spell and his or her opponents getting more cards to win.  All of these work, however, the less random and more "unfair" cards should be less frequent and at higher rarities.



The most important aspect of any Magic card design is that the card encourages fun and exciting play.  The best ante cards are exciting for all players.  The more interaction players have the more they will want to keep playing to figure out the puzzles the cards create.  For the player casting the ante spell, the card should allow the player to do something they want that may not be feasible without ante because of its high power level.  Ultimately, fun need to be happening for players to want to risk their cards.  Without fun, no one will play.

Now the examples I have shown today may not be perfect and probably break some of the ideas I have talked about.  What is important to remember with any design is to push it to ask the question of why or why not does this card design work and/or help create a fun game experience.  I hope that these articles encourage you to design some ante card of your own and at the very least that you try playing Zen.  Until next time, may all of your ante winnings be Black Lotuses.