Last week, Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), who’s currently running for vice president on a ticket with former President Donald J. Trump, confirmed for Semafor that once upon a time ago he played Magic: The Gathering. He also revealed his favorite deck: a fairly powerful construction named “Yawgmoth’s Bargain.” But what Vance didn’t mention — or perhaps was not aware of — is that the card that gave the deck its name, an enchantment also called Yawgmoth’s Bargain, has been banned from most Magic formats of competitive and casual play.
So why was JD Vance’s favorite Magic card consigned to the dustbin of history? Because it sucks. Here’s why.
Image: Wizards of the Coast
Yawgmoth’s Bargain, as stated above, is an enchantment — and a fairly pricey one, at that. It costs the caster a total of six mana, including two black and four of any other color they happen to have on hand. While there are ways around that restriction, the high cost generally means this card won’t see the table until a match is already well underway, once players have built up enough resources to cast it. Once in play, however, it offers the caster an incredibly powerful ability.
“Skip your draw step,” reads the card, meaning that the caster can no longer take a new card from the top of their draw pile at the start of each round. Instead, they’re given a new power: “Pay 1 life: Draw a card.” It’s a gamble with the players’ own life force, one that asks them to harm themselves in the pursuit of power. And, like all bad Magic cards, it’s nearly impossible to counter as it’s played.
In a game of Magic, each player starts with 20 life, and the winner is the player who can reduce their opponent to zero. So that means once you’ve played Yawgmoth’s Bargain at the table, you can potentially draw up to 19 cards, play all of them, and never once relinquish your turn to the other player.
In layperson’s terms, playing the card means you get up to 19 turns before your opponent gets to take even one. Basically, having Yawgmoth’s Bargain played against you feels like getting sucker-punched in a fight, knocked clean out by a velvet hammer before you had the chance to even mount a defense. It clearly seemed like a good idea at the time, otherwise the developers wouldn’t have made the card in the first place. But once it got out into the wild, Yawgmoth’s Bargain was such a bummer, with such a bad reputation in the player community, that the same people who made the card and sold it for cash also changed the rules of their own game so that the card can never be played again. That’s how bad Vance’s favorite card was.
Of course, Yawgmoth’s Bargain isn’t the only Magic card banned over the years, but it is among the most hated by the community for reasons which, by now, should be obvious.
It’s unclear whether or not Vance was still playing Magic at the time the card was banned. That’s because, he says, he walked away from the world’s most popular trading card game around the same time Yawgmoth’s Bargain came out.
“The big problem with […] being a [15-year-old] who likes Magic: The Gathering,” Vance told Semafor, “is that 15-year-old girls do not like Magic: The Gathering. […] So I dropped it like a bad habit.”
Unlike Vance, there are plenty of fans of Magic: The Gathering, of every gender, who stuck with it. The game remains the bestselling trading card game in the world, a multibillion-dollar titan that has powered its owner Hasbro through a precipitous decline in the retail toy industry. It’s become a hobby that brings people together the world over on a weekly basis — now just without the totemic representation of a Faustian bargain that the former president’s current running mate was so clearly fascinated with in his youth.
