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The actual headline is 'Venmo is offering users an (ugly) physical debit card,' so the '(ugly)' part complicates this. From a quick search, it seems like 'an' is correct here, because the '(ugly)' part isn't an independent clause... or something like that.

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That's always tricky to do, since you want the parenthetical to be optional -- the sentence should work even if you remove it totally. So I personally would have done "... offering users a(n ugly) physical debit card", but I concede that can look pedantic at best and confusing at worst.

"a" vs "an" is solely a matter of pronunciation; you go off of the next word no matter what it is.

That's what I had assumed, but this grammar StackExchange[1] answer seemed to specify that there are exceptions. Admittedly, I didn't read the articles he linked.

1: https://english.stackexchange.com/a/115200

> I need an (well, if I need anything at all) idiom.

This is not an English sentence. No native English speaker would produce this (regardless of a/an)

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