writer (derogatory). lead designer on Fallen London.
http://twitter.com/notbrunoagain
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Now that the Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame is progressing, I'm curious, what are some stories you'd like to hear about it or questions you have or just things you're curious about?
Also, I am going to slow down the pace of posting these. It just so happens that originally I wrote a "chapter" that was absurdly long and ended up broken up into three chapters.
I'm just in for the Journey. I've got some issues with MTG, but reading this has been great.
I got into the game around Ice Age, and the ante rules always kind of perplexed me. Did anyone ever really use those rules or cards like Contract from Below and Demonic Attorney?
Looking at old Usenet posts it's clear that people did play for ante early on. My sense of it is that it was, initially, part of the fun and one of the things that made the game exciting – it was kind of a proto-legacy game, where game events could affect the game pieces in permanent ways.
This lasted for like two months or so. As people bought more packs and started valuing cards more and more, it crossed over from 'exciting' into 'stressful' pretty quickly. As far as I can surmise almost nobody was playing for ante as soon as early 1994. Wizards banned ante from sanctioned play pretty much with the original set of tournament rules, but they took a while longer to actually drop ante entirely from the game – the last ante card is actually from Homelands.
