Amulet of Quoz

The clearest artifact of Magic's first design era, when the rules still assumed you were playing for keeps. Ante was the original stakes mechanic: each player put the top card of their library into a shared pile, and the winner took the spoils. This is the most aggressive expression of that idea, a coin-flip that does not merely ante a card but ends a player's game outright, with the catch that the loser of the flip is just as likely to be you. The opening line of the oracle text is the design's own surrender note: remove this from your deck if you are not playing for ante, an instruction that effectively retired the card the moment tournament rules banned ante entirely. That ban is why the whole category, Amulet of Quoz among them, became a historical curiosity rather than a playable archetype. What makes it worth studying is the friction packed into a single upkeep activation: an opponent-granted out (they can pay the toll by anteing a card to avoid the flip), a coin toss that punishes both players symmetrically, and the tap-and-sacrifice cost that makes the whole gamble a one-shot. It survives now as a relic of the period before Wizards decided that no card should be able to take your collection or end the game on a coin toss.