Yesterday, a long-anticipated ban announcement finally put a stop to the Modern menace that was Nadu, Winged Wisdom. Since the Pro Tour, Nadu has completely dominated Modern play. Thanks to the presence of cards like Shuko that can target your own creatures for zero mana, Nadu’s combo potential was through the roof.
Interestingly, though, Nadu’s textbox didn’t start this way. In a recent article by Michael Majors, lead designer of MH3, he admits that Nadu was a complete design mistake. As we will see, some last-minute changes were partly responsible for the card’s broken nature. There’s a lot to discuss here, and it’s important to start by taking a peek at the original design for Nadu.
Nadu’s Original Design
Nadu is an interesting case where, knowing what we know now, it seems a bit egregious that the card made it through testing as is. After all, Nadu granting all of your creatures the potent card advantage ability and allowing the ability to trigger more than once per creature is a bit crazy when you think about it. Well, as it turns out, the original design for Nadu didn’t reward you for targeting your own creatures in the same way.
- Mana Value: 1GU
- Stats: 3/4
- Flying. You may cast permanent spells as though they had flash.
Whenever a permanent you control becomes the target of a spell or ability an opponent controls, reveal the top card of your library. If it’s a land card, put it onto the battlefield. Otherwise, put it into your hand.
Apparently, where Nadu started in the design process was as shown above. There are some pretty big differences here. On one end, getting to cast permanent spells at instant speed is a big deal, as is having Nadu trigger whenever any permanent you control gets targeted by an opposing spell or ability. On the flip side, though, this version of Nadu doesn’t grant you any bonus for targeting your own creatures.
In the article, Michael Majors stated that the primary concern with this iteration of Nadu lied with its role in Commander. This does make some sense, especially with Prophet of Kruphix on the ban list. With this in mind, in a “series of last-minute checks,” this ability was deemed too concerning. Yet, once removed, there was fear the card wouldn’t have a home at all without more adjustments. This is what ultimately led to the card’s new text.
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Lack of Playtesting and Commander Focus
Unfortunately, Michael Majors along with the last group of people that were shown the card “missed the interaction with zero-mana abilities” that allowed Nadu to pop off in Modern. Nadu’s new design received no playtesting, as the team was too far along. This gives Nadu big Skullclamp vibes (Skullclamp is another card that was altered last second, and whose change ultimately made the card much more broken than it otherwise would have been).
By itself, this is a big area of concern. But there’s even more to the story. Nadu’s final text actually came off an attempt to “create a build-around aimed at Commander play.” Unsurprisingly, this generated a lot of uproar from the community.
First of all, many players were frustrated that a card from MH3, a set clearly designed as a straight-to-Modern set, would be focused more on Commander than Modern right off the bat. Add in the lack of playtesting that led to the broken version in Modern we ended up with, and it’s no wonder players were angered by the situation.
Some brought up the fact that this situation could have been avoided if the designed-for-Commander card was just printed in one of the MH3 Commander Precons, which were obviously created with Commander as the focus. The issue is, the new design for Nadu proved to be problematic for Commander, too! At the end of the day, Nadu’s insane combo potential coupled with the long, drawn-out turns it enables made it a nuisance for Modern and Commander players alike.
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Moving Forward
As unfortunate as this massive design error has been for the MTG community at large, it’s quite a good thing that Wizards of the Coast addressed it, and we encourage these sort of addresses in the future. Even in the face of mistakes, nothing is more commendable than communication like this.
A number of things will be changing in order to avoid something similar in the future. Right away, when it comes to the timing of bans, the overall cadence of the announcements is changing. The goal is now to align bans with the Regional Championship Qualifier season. In theory, this should help better address consumer confidence while ensuring that an obviously broken card like Nadu doesn’t terrorize competitive events for an extended period of time.
Going forward, Wizards of the Coast is making it a point to give all testing groups adequate time to make changes. Michael Majors even stated that he should lean on the side of caution in cases where he can’t draw clear conclusions, such as with Nadu’s new text box.
Frankly, with power creep in full force, not every card needs to push the envelope as far as it can go. Hopefully design mistakes like Nadu are kept to a minimum in years to come.
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