Why was JD Vance’s favorite Magic: The Gathering card banned?

Last week it was confirmed that Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), who is currently running for vice president on a ticket with former President Donald J. Trump, Blessing that he once played long ago Magic: The Gathering. He also revealed his favorite deck: a fairly powerful construction called “Yawgmoth’s Bargain.” But what Vance didn’t mention — or perhaps didn’t know — is that the card that gave the deck its name is an enchantment also called “Yawgmoth’s Bargain.” Yawgmoth’s bargainhas been banned from most sites Magic formats of competitive and informal play.

So why was JD Vance’s favorite Magic map consigned to the dustbin of history? Because it is worthless. Here’s why.

Yawgmoth’s Bargain is, as mentioned above, an enchantment – and a rather expensive one at that. It costs the caster a total of six mana, including two black and four of whatever color they happen to have on hand. While there are ways around this limitation, its high price generally means this card only sees play later in a match, once players have mustered up enough resources to cast it. Once in play, however, it grants the caster an incredibly powerful ability.

“Skip your draw step,” the card reads, meaning the caster can no longer draw a new card from the top of their draw pile at the start of each round. Instead, they gain 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 is almost impossible to counter it while it is being played.

In a game of MagicEach player starts with 20 lives, and the winner is the player who can reduce their opponent to zero. This means that once you have played Yawgmoth’s Bargain at the table, you can potentially draw up to 19 cards, play them all, and never have to give your turn to the other player.

In layman’s terms, playing the card means you get up to 19 turns before your opponent gets to play a single one. Essentially, it feels like getting hit in a fight by Yawgmoth’s Bargain, knocked out cold by a velvet hammer before you even have a chance to defend yourself. It clearly seemed like a good idea at the time, or the developers wouldn’t have made the card in the first place. But once it hit the wild, Yawgmoth’s Bargain was such a disappointment, with such a bad reputation in the player community, that the same people who made the card and sold it for money Also changed the rules of their own game so that the card could never be played again. That’s how bad Vance’s favorite card was.

Of course, Yawgmoth’s Bargain isn’t the only one Magic card banned over the yearsbut it’s one of the most hated apps within the community, for reasons that should be obvious by now.

It is unclear whether Vance was still playing Magic when the card was banned. That, he says, is because he distanced himself from the world’s most popular trading card game around the same time Yawgmoth’s Bargain came out.

“The big problem with (…) a (15 year old) is that of Magic: The Gathering“, Vance told Semafor, “is that 15-year-old girls are not Magic: The Gathering. (…) So I dropped it like a bad habit.”

Unlike Vance, there are plenty of fans of Magic: The Gatheringof both genders, who continued to play it. The game remains the world’s best-selling trading card game, a multibillion-dollar behemoth that helped owner Hasbro weather a steep decline in the toy industry. It’s become a hobby that brings people from all over the world together on a weekly basis — only now without the totemic representation of a Faustian bargain that the former president’s current running mate was so clearly fascinated with in his youth.