Back in the early days of MtG, the game was played for keeps. Indeed, the official rules discussed starting the game with an Ante — or a single card revealed from the top of your library. The play who won the game took both cards in Ante and kept them… forever.

Playing for Ante added a sense of danger to any match and really upped the tension level if you knew that you might lose a key card. In addition to starting with a couple of cards in Ante, there were a few cards in the early sets that allowed a player to manipulate the cards revealed at the start. In fact, through the lens of Ante the single most powerful card in the history of MtG is not Ancestral Recall nor Black Lotus but instead Contract from Below!

Eat your heart out Ancestral!

Because of cards like those shown above, the Ante was another resource that the players could manipulate thus adding a layer of tactical play to this already fascinating game. The only downside — you lost cards forever — and that kinda sucks.

Enter Soft Ante

Due to the dynamics of my early play groups, Ante as described in the rulebooks didn’t really work. First, all of the cards that we had at our disposal were owned by a single person. Second, we all played differently mono-colored decks, so wining a card was almost always useless. Finally, we tended to house-rule away the sharpest edges of the game to make for a less cut-throat experience. All of that said however we still liked the idea of Ante providing a potentially tense experience and the way that we attempted to preserve that was via Soft Ante.

Our sessions of MtG tended to play out over the course of a night between and supplementing role-playing games. Therefore, players would likely get into 5–10 matches of Magic in a night. Therefore, we used Ante as a way to potentially weaken (and in some cases strengthen) players’ decks over the course of a session. There were tangible effects felt from losing a card to Soft Ante as our total card inventory was sparse and losing a single card might’ve meant losing a whole win-condition. For my own deck, turning over a Lich or a Healing Salve to the Ante meant that I was in danger of losing out on extremely powerful effects for the next 5+ games. This was a big deal!

Long Live the Soft Ante

Over my rediscovery of MtG in the past year I’ve come across numerous formats attempting to relieve those grand early years of the game. From 93/94, to Eternal Weekend, to Alpha40, to Revised40, to OGT2, to Old School 95, to Premodern, the Ante rule and its cards are banned from play. However, I believe that instituting Soft Ante for some tournament or another in these formats could lead to the revival of some long-lost cards and long-forgotten tactics around using Ante as a resource.