At this point, everyone knows that Nadu, Winged Wisdom was a mistake. The designers of MTG have even stated this themselves in no uncertain words. Rightfully, this card was banned in Modern where it has been running rampant since release. Despite this, conversations surrounding the card haven’t ceased.
It’s safe to say that the admission Wizards made a mistake has caused a ruckus in the MTG community. Days after this announcement the debate has continued to rage on and gain more traction. Thanks to this, MTG’s Head Designer, Mark Rosewater, has delivered their own unprompted statement on the subject.
Change for Good
Given the ban has already happened, Rosewater didn’t focus on Nadu’s dominance in their recent statement. Instead, since they’re Magic’s Head Designer, they focused on the “design elements of the situation.” Knowing what happens behind the scenes they rightfully defended the decisions that ultimately led to Nadu’s creation.
One of the big problems that players are unhappy about is the fact Nadu was changed very late in the development cycle. This led to it not getting the playtesting it deserved, allowing its broken MTG combo to slip through the cracks. After this was revealed, many players have been asking Wizards to simply stop changing cards last minute.
Responding to this concern, Rosewater highlighted the good that late changes can bring for MTG. While specifics weren’t given, Rosewater did note that the successful design stories barely get noticed, let alone praised. It’s only when something goes wrong that players scrutinize this otherwise useful development tool.
In a previous post, Rosewater states last minute changes are “usually done in a way to avoid impacting constructed formats.” While mistakes do obviously happen, these are in the vast minority. Explaining this, Rosewater likened the situation to aviation accidents that get huge attention while thousands of flights happen without incident.
Due to this, Wizards likely isn’t going to stop changing cards at the last minute. Hopefully, going forward, these cards will get additional scrutiny and playtesting to appease players. This has essentially been promised by Modern Horizon 3’s Lead Designer, Michael Majors, who stated the goal of being more conservative.
The Playtesting Problem
Inherently connected to the matter of last-minute changes is the issue of playtesting. If Nadu had been playtested properly, it likely never would have been printed as is. The simple solution to this seems to be to increase the amount of playtesting MTG cards receive. As Rosewater states, however, this isn’t as perfect a solution as it might seem initially.
In their statement, Rosewater noted that Wizards only has so many employees. On top of this, there’s only so much time in the day for playtesting before the next MTG set comes along. Due to this, developers have to make “calculated gambles (based on years of experience) and test the things most likely to cause problems.”
Obviously, this isn’t a perfect solution, but just like the last-minute changes, it does work. While sometimes overpowered cards slip through the system thanks to Magic’s complexity, not every card is completely broken. Even though the failure rate may be low, Wizards still vows to “continually improve our process to lower the chances of mistakes.”
While completely eliminating mistakes would be nice, the sheer volume of work that would take is untenable. Explaining this problem in a later Blogatog post Rosewater highlighted how 7540 Modern legal cards contain the word “target.” To properly playtest Nadu, each one of these would have to be checked. Should this process take just five minutes per card, Rosewater highlighted how this would take roughly 29 days.
Due to the scale of Magic and its immense complexity, playtesting every MTG card against everything is practically impossible. Not only are Wizards working roughly two years in advance, but they’re creating a huge volume of sets and cards. With this in mind, it’s no wonder that Wizards has to pick and choose what gets playtested.
Concerns about Commander
As if it wasn’t bad enough that Nadu wasn’t tested properly, this card was also initially intended for Commander. Given this format’s influence over MTG, this immediately aggravated a lot of players, especially Modern players. Given that Modern Horizons 3 has Modern in the name, putting Commander cards in the main set seems strange, no?
In their statement, Rosewater explained there’s no reason not to design for Commander. Only a handful of cards in each set can be competitively relevant, so there’s bound to be a lot of Draft chaff. There’s little reason that these cards, at every rarity, can’t be oriented toward Commander rather than being literally useless.
Considering Commander is easily the most popular format in MTG, not doing this would be downright baffling. The alternative of making every card competitively relevant is equally problematic as it would cause unprecedented format warping. Not only would this exacerbate concerns around forced rotations, but it would make keeping up with competitive MTG obscenely expensive.
Ultimately, it’s for the good of MTG that a lot of cards nowadays are designed with Commander in mind. This keeps Commander interesting and shouldn’t hurt anything if these cards were never competitively viable in the first place. Admittedly this philosophy can still cause problems where competitive cards are also Commander cards, but that’s just a modern MTG design problem.
Ultimately, Wizards of the Coast isn’t new to making MTG. While mistakes do still happen, every set is hardly filled with overpowered format-warping bombs. Hopefully, this latest mistake will have Wizards revise their development strategies to delay or prevent the next broken card. While that next card feels inevitable, we can at least take solace in the fact bans exist.
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