Demonic Attorney

The first line of oracle text is the more telling one: an explicit instruction to remove the card from your deck if you are not playing for ante, an admission baked into the printing that the format it was designed for did not survive. Ante asked each player to exile the top card of their library to the ante zone before the game began, with the winner keeping both. This sorcery accelerated that exchange, forcing a second ante on resolution and turning a routine spell into a way to double the stakes of a game already underway. It belongs to Magic's earliest design philosophy, when ante was a real rule and the game was sold as a gambling product where you played for keeps. Wizards moved away from that quickly: the DCI banned ante cards from sanctioned play, and the mechanic was retired from design entirely, leaving a small handful of cards (Contract from Below, Jeweled Bird, Tempest Efreet, and this one) as artifacts of a Magic that briefly existed and then did not. The card has not been playable in any sanctioned format for decades. It survives now as a fossil from the moment the game decided what kind of game it was going to be, and chose not to be this one.