Last week, Senator JD Vance (R-OH), who is currently running for Vice President alongside former President Donald J. Trump, confirmed Traffic light that he once played Magic: The Gathering. He also revealed his favorite deck: a pretty powerful construct 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 Tradewas by most magic Formats for competitive and casual games.
Why was JD Vance’s favorite magic
Image: Wizards of the Coast
Yawgmoth’s Trade is, as mentioned above, an enchantment—and a pretty expensive one at that. It costs the wizard 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 this limitation, the high cost generally means that this card doesn’t see the table until a game is already in full swing and players have amassed enough resources to cast it. Once it’s in play, however, it gives the wizard an incredibly powerful ability.
“Skip your draw step,” the card says, meaning that at the start of each turn, the wizard can no longer take a new card from the top of his draw pile. Instead, he gains a new power: “Pay 1 life: draw a card.” It is a gamble with the player’s own life force, requiring him to harm himself in order to gain power. And like all bad magic Cards, it is almost impossible to counter them when they are played.
In a game of magiceach player starts with 20 lives and the winner is the player who can reduce their opponent’s lives to zero. This means that once you’ve played Yawgmoth’s Bargain at the table, you can potentially draw up to 19 cards, play all of them, and never give your turn to the other player.
In layman’s terms, playing the card means you have up to 19 turns before your opponent can even take a turn. Basically, playing Yawgmoth’s Bargain against you feels like you’re getting a sneaky punch in a fight and being knocked down by a velvet hammer before you even have a chance to defend yourself. 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 was out in the wild, Yawgmoth’s Bargain was such a flop and had 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, Yawgmoths Bargain is not the only magic
It is unclear whether Vance was still playing magic at the time the card was banned. That’s because, he says, he turned away from the world’s most popular trading card game around the same time that Yawgmoth’s Bargain came out.
“The big problem with […] as [15-year-old] who likes Magic: The Gathering”, Vance told Semafor, “is that 15-year-old girls don’t like Magic: The Gathering. […] So I gave it up like a bad habit.”
In contrast to Vance, there are many fans of Magic: The Gatheringof any gender who have stuck with it. The game remains the best-selling trading card game in the world, a multibillion-dollar titan that has carried its owner Hasbro through a steep decline in the toy industry. It has become a hobby that brings people together around the world on a weekly basis – only now without the totemic depiction of a Faustian pact that the former president’s current vice presidential candidate was so obviously fascinated with in his youth.
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