As the lead designer of Modern Horizons 3, I wanted to weigh in on our decision today.

Nadu, Winged Wisdom was a design mistake.

The community quickly identified in preview season that the combination of Shuko or Outrider en-Kor with Nadu could allow a player to draw their entire library. As one would expect, many early lists were untuned, being either too fragile or using Nadu more as an afterthought than a primary game plan. Before Pro Tour Modern Horizons 3, Nadu was clearly a strong deck but hadn't quite shown itself as bannable.

As we know, the Pro Tour changed that. The best players in the world had the incentive to tune the deck for the highest possible upside, and they delivered. They removed Thassa's Oracle from the deck and figured out how to handle any situation through a convoluted Endurance and Springheart Nantuko loop that could effectively give Nadu players infinite mana and the means to fight through any situation, including interaction and battlefield sweepers. This loop also required demonstrating a complicated series of game actions with a high number of permanents changing zones that resulted in extremely long turns.

The deck was beautifully built and a logistical nightmare.

The deck dominated the tournament with a 59% win rate, and Simon Nielson claimed the Pro Tour trophy. Since then, it has performed worse. Some of this can be attributed to the fact that the deck is objectively weaker in online formats. Many players still resort to using Thassa's Oracle, a weak card outside the combo once they've drawn their entire deck due to the Endurance loop being unrealistic under an online timer. This makes the deck more vulnerable to mulligans and weaker to interaction. Despite that, it continues to be a prevalent part of the winner's metagame on Magic Online and is threatening to put up incredible numbers at RCQ's.

Removing another combination card like Shuko or Outrider en-Kor wouldn't solve the logistical problem that Nadu presents. Even at weaker win rates, Nadu leveraging Lightning Greaves or similar cards could still be problematic for the long-term enjoyment of tournaments. Since it threatens to monopolize people's time, all while not being a fun or easy deck to interact with, there isn't a compelling argument to preserve the deck.

For these reasons, Nadu, Winged Wisdom is banned.

So, how did we get here?

Nadu went through almost all of Modern Horizons 3's development looking something like this:

Nadu, Winged Wisdom
1GU
Legendary Creature – Bird Wizard
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.

Nadu was a powerful option against interaction and a part of various Bant midrange strategies throughout our testing, but it wasn't something that our group perceived as much more than a role player.

For some more context, Modern Horizons testing works differently than typical Standard FFL (Future Future League). For both Modern Horizons 2 and Modern Horizons 3, we brought in a small group of contractors and worked on the set in a dedicated sprint as a collaboration between that group and a small number of play designers. The playtesting time is more dense, as the group is singularly focused on the set without other responsibilities, but shorter in terms of weeks.

After the playtesting, there were a series of last-minute checks of the sets by various groups. This is the normal operating procedure for every release. It is a series of opportunities for folks from various departments and disciplines to weigh in on every component of the project and give final feedback.

In one of these meetings, there was a great deal of concern raised by Nadu's flash-granting ability for Commander play. After removing the ability, it wasn't clear that the card would have an audience or a home, something that is important for every card we make. Ultimately, my intention was to create a build-around aimed at Commander play, which resulted in the final text.

I missed the interaction with zero-mana abilities that are so problematic. The last round of folks who were shown the card in the building missed it too. We didn't playtest with Nadu's final iteration, as we were too far along in the process, and it shipped as-is.

I want to go over some talking points and learnings, but before I do, I'll emphasize that, despite the failings in process, ultimately the card was my responsibility as the lead designer of the set.

The Scope of Risk

A lot of early buzz surrounding Nadu included comments like, "Why does it have four toughness?" or, "If it only triggered once, it would be ok," and the most extreme being, "Did they put the quotations on the card in the wrong place?"

As I've already gone over, the most obvious answer to things is typically the right one.

Nadu was not an attempt to push a card right up to the perceived maximum power level and missing the mark. If I had grasped the scope of risk here, I would have changed the text box entirely and not hoped that trimming a toughness would land us in the perfect spot.

However, much of managing a Modern Horizons set is walking that tightrope of risk. Ugin's Labyrinth and Chthonian Nightmare are examples of cards that we shipped with eyes wide open. There was a chance of those cards going wrong, but they are things we deemed worth doing to inject power and excitement into both lapsed and brand-new decks.

As a concrete example of something we changed, Amped Raptor had a much more cascade-like ability early in development. This resulted in a lot of Glimpse of Tomorrows being cast. The deck wasn't too strong, but the combo turns took forever, and the deck wasn't very enjoyable. We even failed to patch it out a few times by changing Amped Raptor in various ways, but ultimately, we had to redesign the card to what it is now to avoid as many shenanigans as possible. The benefits of creating this new Glimpse deck didn't make up for with how unenjoyable the play pattern was.

Many more cards in Modern Horizons 3 are open-ended build-arounds that try not to be immediately obvious with how to use them. We put them through their paces as a group and, in most cases, didn't conclude how to optimize them. To me, Magic is the most fun when it presents a puzzle for people to experiment with and debate.

"So, right, you missed it, and clearly there's a desire to take risks, so what does that mean moving forward?"

What We Learned

This is both a design and logistical failure. This is something we're trying to tackle in a variety of ways. The Banned and Restricted announcement timing is changing to be optimized for RCQ's and widespread competitive play going forward. While we can't guarantee we'll avoid bans in the future, we can take steps to make sure that they will do as little damage as possible for players who want to invest their time and energy into competitive formats.

On the inside, it's a combination of things.

One: At a high level, we want to make sure that all relevant groups have time to impact change in a time window that makes sense for the project.

I have faith that if the current Nadu had been scrutinized while our contractors were actively playtesting, things would have turned out better.

Two: I'll be putting more effort toward being conservative if I can't draw clear conclusions, as well as encouraging that behavior in others. I didn't know that Shuko was powerful with Nadu. However, I was aware that I didn't fully understand the implications of Nadu's text box. That should have urged me to more aggressively seek other opinions and, failing any strong conclusions, to default to something I better understood. I was blinded by a goal: "make something that's really awesome for somebody." Ultimately, nobody was happy.

I'll conclude by stressing the point that Magic is a game of enormous complexity. We won't get things right all the time or always be able to predict how our formats respond. However, the creation of this game is a labor of love, and so in these situations that fall on the side of clear mistakes with clear solutions, we take them very seriously and are always looking to improve the way we make the game.