Darkpact (Original Art)

Darkpact is a three-mana black sorcery card, first printed in Alpha (1993). If you were not playing for ante, you had to remove this card from your deck before playing. Basically, you could swap the top card of your library with any of the card in ante. Ante was designed by Richard Garfield and introduced in Alpha. If players agreed to play for ante, at the beginning of the game, before drawing their starting hands, each player would put a random card from their library into the ante zone. The winner of that game received permanent ownership of all the cards in that zone. Ante was intended to introduce an element of gambling to Magic and to provide an element of risk so that the player with better cards wouldn’t always win. This proved out to be quite unpopular, as many players did not like risking the loss of their cards. There were also concerns within Wizards of the Coast that playing for ante might result in official tournaments being legally recognized as gambling. As a result, WotC removed ante rules from the game in 1995. Because Darkpact uses the ante mechanic, it’s banned in every sanctioned format. The only place where this card is still sometimes seen is in Old School (93-94), where some local groups would allow ante cards. Darkpact is on the Reserved List, it will never be reprinted in a tournament-legal form.