Contract from Below

The clearest artifact of a design era when Magic still imagined itself as a gambling game between two strangers staking their collections. Ante was the original wager mechanic baked into the rules, and Contract from Below is the card that took the idea to its logical extreme: pay one black mana, throw away whatever you were holding, wager the next card off your deck as the stake, and refill to a fresh seven. The rate is preposterous by any modern accounting (a one-mana Wheel of Fortune effect in black, a color that historically pays life or extra cards for a refill of that size, and here even the discard-your-hand clause is closer to upside than cost when you are dumping a dead grip), and it is preposterous precisely because the ante was supposed to be the real price. When tournament Magic moved away from ante almost immediately, the cards built around it were stranded; the DCI banned the entire ante cycle from sanctioned play, and that ban has never been revisited. What remains is a glimpse of a version of the game where the most efficient draw spell ever printed was balanced by the threat of losing a card from your deck forever, and where the rules instruction to remove the card before playing without ante was a genuine condition rather than a curiosity. The design space closed behind it, and nothing printed since has tried to reopen the door.