Yawgmoth's Bargain

Premodern-legal editions of Yawgmoth's Bargain — old-border printings plus any period-appropriate foil promos (Arena/Judge, through Scourge). Hover to preview an edition on the card; click to select it.

Urza's Destiny

1999·udsrare

Selected

Old-border editions + pre-Scourge promo foils (Arena/Judge). Modern-frame reprints (8th Edition onward) exist but are not period-appropriate printings.

Why It's Banned

Bargain takes the already-banned Necropotence engine and strips away its only real downside, letting you pay 1 life to draw a card immediately rather than exiling cards to a delayed end-of-turn pile. In a slow, interactive Premodern metagame where life totals are a renewable resource, that means a single uncontested turn converts your life cushion directly into a fistful of cards, fueling combo and ritual-storm starts no fair deck can answer. Like Necropotence before it, it warps games into a race against an unstoppable card-advantage spiral.

Yawgmoth's Bargain debuted in Urza's Destiny (1999) and was a centerpiece of the Combo Winter era, contributing to Urza-block enchantments being among the most banned cards in competitive Magic. It sits squarely inside the Premodern legal window and was placed on the format's ban list at its 2017 establishment.

Trivia & Lore

• Mark Rosewater designed Yawgmoth's Bargain as a deliberately 'fixed' Necropotence: you draw cards immediately instead of holding them until your end/draw step, paid for by doubling the cost to {4}{B}{B}. R&D's Aaron Forsythe later admitted it was 'not exactly a fix' — it was 'actually better than Necro in multiple ways,' since once it resolved you'd almost always win, so players just sold out on fast mana to cheat it into play.
• Its full Oracle text is 'Skip your draw step. Pay 1 life: Draw a card.' at a cost of {4}{B}{B}, with flavor text 'He craves only one commodity.' — the 'he' being Yawgmoth, the Phyrexian god whose only currency is the life of his followers.
• It was first printed in Urza's Destiny (released June 1999, collector #75), illustrated by Michael Sutfin. Its only reprint to date is the digital-only Vintage Masters set (Magic Online, June 2014, #147), where it was bumped from rare up to mythic. Despite common assumptions, it is NOT on the Reserved List — Urza's Destiny rares like this one were left off / removed when the list was finalized in 2002.
• Restricted in Type 1 (Vintage) back in 1999, the year it was printed, it stayed restricted for nearly two decades until Wizards unrestricted it effective September 1, 2017 — part of an experiment to unleash old powerful cards and see whether they were still a threat in modern Vintage.
• Its most notorious enabler was Academy Rector: sacrificing the Rector (often to Phyrexian Tower, which itself produces two black mana) tutors any enchantment straight onto the battlefield, dropping a free Yawgmoth's Bargain into play. This 'Rector Bargain' engine fed Trix-style kills with Illusions of Grandeur + Donate.
• Beyond Vintage, Yawgmoth's Bargain is banned in both Legacy and Commander/EDH (the Commander ban dates to May 2006); even at six mana, a repeatable single-card life-for-cards engine proved too strong for those formats.