[quote=@PKMNB0Y]
I think it might be best to establish the existence of buying or not before pushing for this, because a Battle City sort of scenario does mean that players are rolling in with their top decks at the very beginning. 
[/quote]

Not necessarily. Only really Kaiba and Marik started with the strongest version of his deck; Yugi got his God in the middle of the arc while Jounouchi literally lost his strongest card (Red-Eyes) before the tournament kicked off, and the entire set-up was so that his deck grew as he won more and more rare cards. Oh, and Yugi was also shown pulling out Lightforce Sword from a pack, a card he went to use for the rest of the tournament, so make of it what you will.

Yes, they'll roll in with the best deck they have, but the best deck they have doesn't have to be full of top-tier cards. The idea was spur-of-the-moment and would definitely need refinement, not to mention I've no guarantee with sticking to it, but I don't think you need to worry about high-tier decks.

Not to mention an Ante rule situation being the perfect excuse to pick up more cards to begin with; by definition you'd be obtaining more stuff as the RP progresses, and theoretically your "top deck" would only be assembled at the very end.

On that note, I'm definitely [i]not[/i] looking for a mainly "game-play" experience. For better or worse, I'm trying to stay as close to a playground free-for-all-format as possible. Even when I still played the game, I played a bunch of decks that don't really have any kind of meta relevance (Pure artifact, Red Dragon Resonator, Genex Super Quantum, Cipher etc.) but that allowed me to have fun playing against other low-tier decks. My most fun opponent is my friend who plays a deck of 37 traps and 3 Uria, so that's the kind of perspective I have on the game.