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.