‘It’s power at any cost’: JD Vance’s favorite Magic: The Gathering deck tells us all we need to know

JD Vance’s favorite Magic: The Gathering card as a 13-year-old boy in Middleton, Ohio might tell us more about Vance the 40-year-old possible vice president of the United States than he realizes.

A clawed metal hand, beckoning for sacrifices. A necromantic monstrosity hunched in the darkness, white teeth showing through its skull. A terrible pact, and an ominous warning: "He craves only one commodity."

This is the infamous trading card known as "Yawgmoth’s Bargain", part of the popular collectible card game. Released in 1999, it has long since been banned from most forms of competitive Magic due to its ability to not just ensure a win, but also entirely take over a game to the point where nothing is fun anymore

Vance, Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate, revealed this August that he’d been something of a hobbyist sorcerer in his teenage years.

“The big problem with transitioning from being a 13-year-old who likes Magic: The Gathering to being a 15-year-old who likes Magic: The Gathering is that 15-year-old girls do not like Magic: The Gathering,” the freshman Ohio senator told Semafor. “So I dropped it like a bad habit.”

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He named Yawgmoth’s Bargain as his “embarrassing” favorite deck, meaning the collection of cards he played with, named for the most infamous one. Magic: The Gathering players tell The Independent that it makes sense Vance would pick that one.

"At the time, it was probably the most powerful deck you could play," one Magic player at a San Francisco game night tells The Independent. "I infer from that that he’s ruthless and wants to win at all costs."

To understand the power of Yawgmoth’s Bargain, you have to know a little about how Magic works.

The game’s central concept is simple enough: you are a powerful wizard dueling against other wizards, and every card represents a spell you can cast. Some cards summon monsters to fight for you, while others let you draw magical power (known as mana) from lands that you control or cast enchantments that affect the whole battlefield.

Victory is simply a matter of using these cards to reduce your opponent’s "life" points to zero before they do the same to you. But you can’t just play your best cards on round one, because each card costs mana and gaining mana takes time.

Moreover, you can never be quite sure what cards will end up in your hand. A typical Magic deck has at least 60 cards in it, assembled by each player out of whatever they happen to own, and you can only draw from this deck once per turn by default.

Enter Yawgmoth’s Bargain. It costs a lot of mana to put on the table – but once it’s there, suddenly everything is different. You can draw card after card and play them immediately, devastating your opponent without giving them a chance to respond. You’re not a wizard anymore; you’re a ravenous vampiric trader turning blood into bullets at lightning speed.

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"Essentially, you’re not playing an interactive game anymore. You’re just sort of playing Solitaire... while the other person sits there and waits for the game to end," said Lucas Kunce, 42, a lifelong Magic player who is also a Democrat Party politician running to unseat Republican senator Josh Hawley in Missouri.

"In tournament Magic, I’m sure a lot of people played it,” said Kunce. “But if JD Vance was playing that at the kitchen table against his buddies, then people probably thought he was kind of a jerk.”

There are many cards in Magic that let you gain life by fulfilling certain conditions, endlessly replenishing whatever you sacrifice. There are also cards that let you gain mana rapidly even early in the game, or rifle through your deck to select a specific card, or still other special powers that compound the power of the awful beast you’re chained to.

Back in the day, you could build your deck around these synergies and become nearly invincible. "[Yawgmoth’s] Bargain is what’s known as a combo deck, meaning that once it puts its key pieces in play it can win the game almost regardless of what the opponent does," said one Magic fan on Reddit’s r/MTG board. "At the time, the deck was insurmountably strong, easily the best thing to be playing, and rendered games trivial and uninteresting."

According to longtime players, this card – and the decks built around it – hit Nineties Magic like a bomb. "It’s famous for being an absolutely overpowered card that warped the play environment for a while," r/MTG user SisterHummingbird told The Independent, citing it as one of several decks that could "win a game on the first turn".

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Kunce, who began playing in the mid-Nineties and kept on playing with his fellow troops while serving with the US Marine Corps in Afghanistan, likewise says it had "a reputation for being a ‘broken’ card".

This, ultimately, is why Yawgmoth’s Bargain was banned in 2006. "There aren’t very many cards that were too powerful in 1999 that are still too powerful in 2024, given how the game has changed," explained one Reddit user, "but Yawgmoth’s Bargain certainly makes the list."

In the Magic community there are always memes going around about what your deck says about you. Red is for all or nothing gamblers. Blue is for conceited Rick and Morty fans. Black is "either an edgelord or was an edgelord".

Almost all of this is light-hearted, and most players who spoke to The Independent said you can’t really tell much about a person’s deeper psychology by what cards they choose.

Still, people didn’t mince words about Yawgmoth’s Bargain. "Annoying and shitty to play against" was one Reddit user’s verdict. "You know the concept of a ‘power gamer’? Bargain players were power gamers," said another.

Some noted the philosophical implications of a black mana themed deck – the type you’d build around Yawgmoth’s Bargain – which is traditionally associated with "greed, ambition, dominance, wickedness, the dead and undead, vampires, demons, blood magic".

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Kunce argues that there is a thematic resonance for his fellow former Marine as well. "The idea of it is a deal with the devil, right? You’re selling your soul for power. And it’s very fitting for the man whose favorite card it is,” he said. “It’s power at any cost, and that seems to be what he’s into."

Kunce says he’s talking about Vance’s politics in general, rather than his relationship with Donald Trump. But it’s worth remembering that Vance once called the mercurial mogul "morally reprehensible" and suggested he might be "America’s Hitler" – back when Trump was merely a candidate and Vance the writer of a popular memoir.

Years later, when Vance wanted to run for the US Senate and Trump had become the GOP’s unshakeable kingmaker, the two men found it in their hearts to make peace.

Indeed, in an interview with The Independent, Vance’s old roommate at Yale Law School went so far as to call him a "hypocrite" who had "sold his soul" to become Trump’s vice presidential pick.

Our inquiry to JD Vance’s team to talk further about his Magic preferences went sadly unanswered.