Look up the phrase "busted to all hell" in the MTG dictionary and you'll see a photo of this card. If this had been printed NOT as an ante card, it would be the only card besides ante cards banned in vintage hands down. Forget restricted...flat out BANNED.
Thank God for ante.
Posted By:
landboysteve
(1/5/2012 10:11:39 AM)
How is this not 5 star from everyone, easily most powerful card ever. Oh and I would say 1 Black Mana for 7 cards even with a discard of your hand is easily better then Ancestral Recall (by the way Ancestral is my favorite card).
Posted By:
Tackle74
(4/15/2010 5:24:26 AM)
Professor Oak
Posted By:
Steinhauser
(2/28/2011 2:01:52 PM)
I had 4 of these in my deck, and I had to take 1 out because I kept accidentally decking myself. This was playing the "Duel of the Planeswalkers" Microprose game. Will all the power nine available to me in playsets, the MVP is still Contract from Below! Seven cards people. SEVEN CARDS.
Posted By:
Zekedog
(5/20/2009 9:12:25 AM)
If ante were still around, this would be an auto-include in every deck. How weird would it be, though, if you had to think about not just how to win, but how to do it with one less card in your deck? And then how many cards would you want to devote to ante manipulation in your deck? It would have been a very different world. A gambling world.
Posted By:
GainsBanding
(2/16/2010 2:09:28 AM)
Wow, that guy won't shut up about ante. Someone get a sedative....
If you get yourself a new hand with almost all of your land still untapped, and you lose the game anyway, you probably deserved to lose two cards.
Posted By:
Kirbster
(7/11/2010 9:34:56 PM)
The power level of this card is off the charts. One mana for a card that lets you discard your hand and draw seven new cards? With a playset of these, you'd be foolish not to play for ante. It would be nearly impossible to lose. Of course, finding an opponent who is willing to play for ante is difficult at best - and once they've seen this deck in action once, they probably won't be playing you again any time soon. In all my years playing Magic, I only played for ante once. I had a black ante deck that used Contract from Below, Darkpact, and Demonic Attorney and was otherwise filled with a bunch of crap commons. I was able to Darkpact my opponent's Rock Hydra even though I lost the game and a Drudge Skeleton.
Posted By:
Eppek_the_Goblin
(1/14/2010 9:39:34 PM)
This card actually got a 6 star rating, but of course the 6th star was put into the ante.
Posted By:
T-101
(6/4/2013 4:46:15 PM)
Hilarius "with" Richard Garfield, Ph.D..
Posted By:
leomistico
(6/20/2011 1:27:03 PM)
Gambling laws are what killed Ante in Magic, though I never met anyone who really wanted to play for ante anyway. It was an interesting idea, I'll give them credit for that, but it failed the moment one card became truly "worth" more than another - what was about 1 minute after the first two packs were opened! Nobody likes to lose what is theirs, especially when they paid for it.
I could see some interesting ante variations, however. Ante could work in a "common pool" format, where everyone chips in a large pile of cards that become common ownership, and people then make decks out of those cards. So, "losing" a card to ante wouldn't really matter since the card pool is owned by the group anyway.
Or, maybe some format where the ante card lost is still owned by the player, but he just cannot use it for the rest of that tournament.
At any rate, this card is absurdly powerful in any format that allows ante - wow!
Posted By:
Radagast
(1/16/2011 2:50:29 PM)