Bronze Tablet

A permanent removal spell whose cost is paid by the target, and whose outcome can hand the gun to the opponent: that is the strangest thing in the original ante stable, and the most baroque. The design is a negotiation engine. Activating it puts an opponent on the horns of a dilemma the rules of ante created and almost no card since has revisited: pay ten life to send the Tablet to the graveyard, or decline and walk away with the Tablet itself. The ten-life clause is the pressure valve, priced to be payable but never comfortable, which is the entire point. Every activation is a real decision, and the loser of that decision loses a card from their collection, not just from the game. The enters-tapped clause plus the six-mana cost and four-mana activation push the first use to turn seven at the earliest, keeping the threat in the late game where ante swings carried the most weight. The opening disclaimer marks a vanished era of Magic: ante was a real format assumption in the mid-1990s, and the DCI's later decision to bar ante from sanctioned play turned cards like this into museum pieces. The design idea is the durable part, and it remains genuinely odd; almost nothing printed since has dared to make removal a transaction the target gets to veto, with their own life total as the ransom.