This was really cool. I often think about ante and Garfield’s insistence on it, but every time I come to the same conclusion “what was he thinking?”. I don’t understand how you could play the game for a year, or watch people play, and still think ante is something the game needs.
Many Magic players don’t like the idea of putting a valuable card at risk each time they play, especially if an opponent antes a land. While some players eliminate the ante altogether, others have developed ways to make it a little less intimidating.
— James Ernest, “Magic: The Gathering Variants“
I started playing after ante was removed, but there’s no way I’m sitting down with a stranger and letting them keep the top card off my deck, ever. That just isn’t fun, and the entire game I’m thinking about possibly losing that card. I understand card values were not the same back then as they are now, but I still think it’s counterintuitive for a fun game to introduce something anxiety-inducing and un-fun. What were the playtest games where Richard Garfield saw the benefits with ante? “Collection building” has to be the worst argument. You’re adding 1 random card from an opponent’s deck 50% of the time after each game, but for $5 you could buy 60 random cards in a box of Revised. Isn’t the latter how you build your collection?
I also don’t know Garfield’s reasoning for it but based on what I’ve read about how he viewed deck building and card acquisition he may have wanted the game to be more fluid or natural, like just use what you have or what you can locally trade for. Ante may have been natural for him as a way to get cards for your deck or have decks change over time.
It also may be relevant that other games at the time that got popular, like Pogs, would be played for keeps or for fun too. Marbles as well I believe. That may have been a more normal part of games, especially those with a collectibility aspect to them. I never played Pogs for keeps either though and hated that aspect too.
What Garfield is missing a bit is that better or older players can take advantage of worse or younger players, and it can create tons of feel bad if you lose a prized card. I think the trade offs just are not there at all and would love to find out more about why he liked it so much.
I would never want to play for ante, but I kind of get it. Garfield envisioned a world where cards were just “out there”, in circulation, and you’d primarily refine your collection by trading with other players, the way earlier generations had done with baseball cards. Home internet access was still new and Amazon hadn’t been founded yet. He thought you’d just play whatever you had; he couldn’t foresee a “metagame” where players stacked their decks with four-ofs, and he certainly could never have imagined a marketplace like TCGPlayer.
Part of me wishes Magic were more like he’d expected, but that ship sailed ages ago. Given that the internet does exist, I think our process for card acquisition is pretty much optimized.
