That's usually balanced more by banning or restricting a card than by rarity. It may have been part of Garfield's early design to use card rarity to limit the meta but it simply doesn't work (instead of limiting the cards it would limit the competitive players to those who can afford the cards). Instead there are multiple formats with different sets of permissible cards, from the most permissible (vintage, which gives access to any card that has ever been printed and is not banned or restricted to 1 copy per deck) to the least (standard, which only gives access to cards from the most recently-printed sets). The deeper the card pool, the more expensive the format as those cards are not reprinted due to their gamebreaking power.
>It may have been part of Garfield's early design to use card rarity to limit the meta but it simply doesn't work
It works with how they imagined the game would sell: somebody in a game group convinced their friends to buy a few packs, they make decks, and play the game as a quick palette cleanser between longer board or roleplaying games. It's also the reason anteing cards was part of the original default ruleset: if people only made decks with a few packs of cards, the game would get stale. So ante meant the cards would rotate through the group and encourage them to alter their decks.
