Yawgmoth's Bargain

Necropotence with the brakes cut. Necropotence had already proven that black would happily trade life for cards at a punishing exchange rate, but it hedged its own power with friction: cards came face-down at end of turn, exiled if discarded, never feeding the same-turn play they paid for. This strips all of that away. The life cost stays, the skipped draw step stays, but the cards arrive in hand the instant you pay, at any point you can hold priority, with no end-step delay and no exile clause. The design discipline that made Necropotence survivable simply is not here, which is why the combination of unrestricted timing and unbounded volume turned out to be a mistake the company could not leave standing. Pair it with any way to gain or replace life and the loop reads, plainly, as "pay your library into your hand." It was banned across the formats it touched and remains so, a fixture on restricted and banned lists rather than a card with a play history to recount. The flavor is exact: where Yawgmoth's Bargain delivers what its namesake always offered, knowledge and power for a price, and then declines to enforce the price in any way that matters.