Magic: The Gathering - Why Was Nadu, Winged Wisdom Banned In Commander?

Hot off the heels of sweeping Pioneer and Modern bannings, Magic: The Gathering is back with some more banned cards, this time in the Commander format. Four major cards took a hit in this wave of bannings, with various responses from the community.

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Of the four cards, only one of them being banned is a legendary creature and, of course, that creature is Nadu, Winged Wisdom. The Simic Bird Wizard has been a terror in playgroups since its release, but why exactly was it a problem for Commander players? We took a look at Nadu and the environment around it to see why this commander was banned.

What Is Nadu, Winged Wisdom?

Nadu, Winged Wisdom is a three-mana commander from the incredibly popular Modern Horizons 3 set. Even at three-mana Nadu is aggressively powered, having a 3/4 stat line, flying, and a wildly good ability. Nadu’s ability effectively lets you get free explore triggers each turn.

With Nadu in play, your creatures all gain the ability to reveal the top card of your library anytime they're targeted by a spell of ability.

If that revealed card is a land, it goes into play. If that card is anything, it goes into your hand. The ability only triggers two times, but that's still a ton in a deck designed specifically around one ability.

So What Made Nadu So Good?

Nadu’s ability, despite only triggering twice per turn per creature, provided a ton of value.

With the right cards, specifically equipment like Shuko and Lightning Greaves that cost zero mana to equip, can quickly run through all your creatures in a turn, giving you tons of triggers of Nadu’s explore-like effect.

There are some very silly cards that you wouldn't even imagine that become absurdly good in Nadu-based decks, or rather were absurdly good before Nadu got banned.

Legends Insant Sea King’s Blessing, for example, lets you target any number of creatures, both yours and your opponent’s, and turn them blue for the turn.

This one-mana spell can give you a ton of Nadu triggers, and since it is at instant speed, you can do it during your opponent’s turn, after you have burned through your two trigger limits on your turn.

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Since you are in both blue and green, you can expect a solid counter package on top of everything to keep Nadu and your other cards safe and a solid ramp package outside of Nadu himself.

Nadu also encourages plenty of landfall effects as well, since you can power through lands from the top of your deck, while at the same time providing consistent card advantage as you effectively draw all the nonland cards you encounter.

Was Nadu Unstoppable?

By no means was Nadu unstoppable. Nadu has some very obvious lines of play, with games playing out fairly consistently in both card choice and direction. The deck can be a tad bit slow, especially in higher levels of play where faster decks shine.

This type of deck is also almost entirely centered around the commander, so if your opponents repeatedly target your Nadu over and over again, or have some sort of way to semi-permanently deal with it with cards like Song of they Dryads and Witness Protection, you’ll be out of luck very quickly.

Why Does That Mean Nadu Had To Be Banned?

The main problem that Nadu caused it to be banned is that everything takes a long time to do.

Remember when we said you can quickly burn through your Nadu triggers with a piece of equipment like Shuko? Well, if you have five creatures in play, and you want to get ten triggers off of Nadu, you have to trigger each instance one at a time to resolve them properly.

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So that means you have to:

• Pay zero mana to equip Shuko to Creature 1.
• Place Creature 1’s Nadu’s trigger on the stack.
• Resolve the trigger, deciding whether the card is a land or a nonland, and then put it into play or your hand.
• Move Shuko to Creature 2.
• Place Creature 2’s Nadu trigger on the stack.
• Resolve that trigger, making the same decisions as the first.

Between then, you might have drawn a card that you might want to play, so you have to determine if you want to play anything else before moving Shuko to another creature.

If that revealed card is a land, it also enters untapped, so if you were tapped out before drawing more cards, you could realistically reveal more lands until you have enough to cast another spell.

Then you repeat that for another eight times in this scenario. All this does is create very oppressive board states that both take a long time to resolve everything and don’t actually win you the game on its own.

Even if Nadu isn’t your commander, it can still cause situations where games take an exorbitant amount of time for just one player’s turn, while not really going anywhere.

Where Can You Still Play Nadu?

Interestingly, Nadu is not banned in Magic: The Gathering Arena’s Brawl format, which in many ways mirrors Commander format.

Since a few mysterious hints at the future of Arena suggest that a true Commander counterpart is on its way in the near future, you can still get your Simic fix digitally.

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