Nadu, Winged Wisdom is banned in Value Vintage.
Value Vintage is first and foremost a format for the players, by the players. This has been something we’ve always sought to embody in everything we do here. This is not just another Wizards of the Coast product being managed by people who are only vaguely aware of what’s happening at any given time, we are player-focused through and through. We are players, just like all of you, and Value Vintage is our favorite way to play the game too. Ultimately, we are here to have fun, just like the rest of you.
Over the course of the format’s existence, Magic has changed. Magic is constantly changing, and so must we alongside it. We’ve made judgment calls on all sorts of nonsense that Wizards has produced over the years, from Stickers and Unfinity cards to Astrolabe, Wastes, and Snow Basics. Though never before have we encountered such a perfect storm such as Nadu; and hopefully we never do again. To Wizards – and to us – Nadu is an exception. Let’s get into why that is.
Nadu was a design mistake
https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/feature/on-banning-nadu-winged-wisdom-in-modern
Through their own well documented admission, the card was not fit for play when it went out the door. It was untested, and its presence in 1v1 play was not in consideration in its design. These are already red flags as far as cards to watch out for in your format go. Modern saw it, Legacy saw it, Commander saw it. Unfortunately the one format that we care about, Vintage, in and of itself has the tools to keep the bird at bay. In layman’s terms, Nadu is so broken in what it does that it requires the best cards ever printed to keep it at a reasonable power level comparatively.
Value Vintage used to depend solely on another format’s checks and balances for its own
When you manage a format, you are effectively designing a game. When you design a game, you choose which pieces from among those that you have created (or in our case, were given to us) that your players get to play with. When you look at any other format, you see that built-in safety valve that the people managing the format use to regulate play – the banned list. Vintage, the format that we relied on to establish which pieces we get to play with, does not come preloaded with a banned list. There was no safety valve. In non-budget vintage, that’s not a problem, because answers have been provided by the people who make the pieces. Losing access to those answers is where we had to step in.
Nadu found the loophole in Value Vintage’s additional measure for achieving format balance
Value Vintage adds one simple rule to deck building; Your deck must cost $30 dollars or less. This single rule banked on the fact that for the most part, strong cards are sought after by players who buy them, thus making their price go up. But what happens when that stopgap doesn’t apply? What happens when every other format prohibits players from wanting the best cards? Well, we found that out with Nadu. The simple combination of the card’s banning in every other format and its extremely dense printing via a heavily in-demand set led to the simplest outcome: Nadu’s price is not tied to its power level. The only other cards in Magic’s history that function similarly have one or more additional things holding them back from following in the bird’s footsteps; they either have a story attached to them that makes them desirable (like Splinter Twin, for example), or their printings were so few and so long ago that copies naturally left the market over time. Nadu was far too fresh for either of these to really take hold over its price, which made it the perfect card to take over the one format that allowed for it.
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So we know how Nadu got here. But Value Vintage is full of very strong, very banned, very heavily printed cards. What’s the difference?
In making our examinations of whether or not to take action against the card / deck, we looked primarily at two very important factors: The Data, and Player Sentiment. Each of these are cited as reasons that Wizards has banned other cards in other formats, and they are the two most key elements in determining the overall fun of the format. Fun is basically the only thing that really matters when it comes to format management. We are basically designing a game here, right? So how do you break the nebulous concept of fun down into something more tangible?
The Data: Nadu (the deck) was objectively too strong
In the last year, we have seen the development and deployment of our current iteration of Nadu Breakfast, the fugitive deck in question today. Initial builds featuring Nadu were either slow enough that our current swath of tools in Value Vintage could handle them, or the card was included with its original intended purpose as a value engine in a deck otherwise not focused on comboing.
Enter: Breakfast. Players found that by combining the resilience and indomitable top-end nature of Nadu with the Breakfast combo (using Cephalid Illusionist to mill your entire library before reanimating a Laboratory Maniac effect for the win), you create a two-pronged attack that ultimately got to double dip on each of its combo pieces via their overlap. Shuko and Nomads En-Kor (or any of the many other 0 mana activated abilities that target) are both incredibly cheap turn one plays that segue very smoothly into either the Breakfast plan (coming down as early as turn 2) or the Nadu Value plan (coming down as early as turn three). All of this asks your opponent to be ready to defeat up to two different plans with up to two different types of enabler that utilize two different zones. Ultimately, this is too much to ask of any one opposing deck.
As such, over the last year, the Nadu Breakfast deck has made its presence known. Of the last five major events, Nadu has appeared at least twice in each of their Top8s. This alone is staggering, but given the deck’s population at each of these events (sub15% of the field across each of them, typically sub10% of players), it is an easy conclusion to draw that the deck’s win rate was just too high pilot notwithstanding.
Player Sentiment: Players do not like to play against Nadu, win or lose
https://moxfield.com/decks/FqoMZy3IC0GiFf4FFeQFbQ/primer
This is a link to the current iteration of the Nadu Breakfast primer, arguably one of the most in depth deck resources we currently have access to in this format. A quick glance will reveal just how many tools the deck currently has access to, how many tested configurations the bi-focal base game plan supports, and ultimately just how strong the deck is on the whole due to how few cards it relies on to function along with how many it can commit to solving its issues.
The deck has a tool for everything, which makes it very difficult (we’ve determined: too difficult) to meaningfully interact with or prepare for. On top of this, Step Through being a tutor for half of both combos, your win condition, and a catch-all answer in Wastescape Battlemage and Chomping Changeling makes the deck’s combo and answer suite extremely consistent. Even if you feel like you have an answer via your correctly named Pithing Needle, they can maneuver around you by going down the route that you weren’t prepared for.
Being a quick deck is nothing new to Value Vintage. We have seen and surely will continue to see strategies that seek to end the game in the first couple of turns. If it were just the Breakfast kill, we wouldn’t be concerned. Nadu provides the Breakfast deck with the best possible alternative, a Plan B that’s stronger than your Plan A. This creates a deckbuilding situation wherein the opposing player feels like they have no viable recourse.
Deckbuilding is not the only aspect of playing Magic. The other end of it is, well, playing Magic. On this front too, the Nadu deck also fails its opponent. Nadu and Cephalid Illusionist do not create simple, repeatable effects (citing again the card Splinter Twin as an example of contrast). The repeated triggering of these cards creates more of a puzzle for its pilot to navigate, pulling random cards off the top of the library in each iteration. While the Breakfast portion of this is relatively repeatable and shortcuttable, the Nadu portion is anything but. Each game action results in a pause in game play as the pilot observes the new board state and declares their next move. Either clicks on MTGO or real time deliberating in paper play, this is time where the opponent cannot actively participate with the game.
In layman’s terms, playing against this strategy feels like you’re wasting your time. Either you sit yielding priority indefinitely as they go through the motions, hopeful that either the pilot messes up or they hit their extremely low fizzle rate, or you are hyper vigilant as you hold your Soul-Guide Lantern open, waiting for an opportunity to activate it and have it matter. The unfortunate reality is that it seldom matters in the end anyway, because as mentioned both above and in-depth in the primer, there are still actions the Nadu pilot can take against this. Long story cut short, playing against Nadu sucks regardless of your approach.
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Now, banning a card is not something that we on the Value Vintage leadership team take lightly. In fact, we’ve never done it before. This decision stems from months of deliberation. We’ve asked every question on the line that led us here that you could possibly ask. Are people not enjoying Value Vintage enough right now that taking action is a consideration? Should we take action on anything, and if so what kind? Bans? Restrictions? Which decks? Which cards from those decks? Do we remove other cards from the decks that we expect to rise to the top afterward? We are Magic players who participate in the Magic community too. Any question you’ve ever had about any ban in any format, we posed to ourselves (and many to you) too. Let’s address the future a little bit about what this means moving forward.
Things that this is
We are officially moving away from being strictly “The Vintage format but you only get $30”. Our confidence in doing this comes from both a general vibe check of our most enfranchised players over time, and our recent survey wherein most people stated they did not view Value Vintage as anything but its own format. Even within the team there were strong advocates on both sides of this debate, but ultimately we decided to side with the perspective of the community. Unique formats have unique banned lists.
The staff team present and working on the Discord are taking an executive action that dictates the direction of the format. While it seems like the first time this has happened, we’ve actually made several such course selections before – just not to this same scale. We are thankful that Stickers is the most recent iteration of this type of debate, and that that issue was solved cleanly shortly after our suggested remedy. We do not want to be lording over this format, merely standing in as interim shepherd when need be. We cannot be for the community / by the community if we do not take actions when actions are needed. Who is to say that actions are needed? You. The community told us that they wanted to see action, and we listened.
Things that this is not
The banning of Nadu will not be a regularly repeated tactic. In an ideal world, it will be the only card to ever see our banned list. We have every intention of being good stewards of the ban hammer, and to never act reactionarily or irrationally. We have fielded complaints of cards that are “too strong” in the past; Violent Outburst, Hogaak Arisen Necropolis, and Channel just to name a few. Nadu is nowhere near the same league as any of these. This is a stance adopted not by vibes, but through due diligence – the same that we applied to Nadu. It isn’t clear where most cards sit on the spectrum of Fine to Problematic, but it is clear when they’ve blown past the far end of the spectrum as Nadu has.
We are in no way choosing favorites or acting to make enemies. This action was taken strictly with the long term health of the format in mind. The staff team works hard to keep a finger on the pulse of the format. With our ultimate goal being to provide a fun and exciting play atmosphere, it was impossible not to notice the loud roar of people’s dissatisfaction with the format. If you’ve been involved in any of our events on the Discord, you’ve likely seen the disdain for the Nadu deck. If you’ve had an opponent at an in-person event, you’ve likely heard the complaints. We get all of that loud and clear. To be frank, the Nadu Breakfast deck was not only stifling the development and expansion of the format, it was actively driving people away. From event attendance numbers being down across the board to engagement on all platforms being measurably lower, it was clear that the community was not happy with the bird’s place in our format. This became severe enough that it was clear we couldn’t just write it off as Magic players being Magic players. Regardless of which side of the discussion you fall on, we take this action because we believe that it is the right choice for you and everyone else long term.
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Why did we choose to take this specific action out of the many options available? We considered restriction over banning. We considered targeting multiple cards, just Cephalid Illusionist, and many other combinations of potential threats. At the end of the day though, Nadu is the heart of the problem. The card is for all intents and purposes not meant to exist in Magic, and we are among the last to right its wrongs.
Overall, we are happy with this change. We believe that it will loosen some of the strings that Value Vintage players have felt around their necks lately, breed a new season of creativity, and breathe some fresh life into the format. We will still be checking in with our community the way that we have been on a very regular basis, but we do not expect to have to do something like this any time soon, if ever again. We hope that you find yourself a little more free in the format as well.
To any Tournament Organizers or folks interested in logistics, Moxfield has already been notified of this change and are currently working on implementing it if it hasn’t been done already. But as of this posting, this ban should be considered in effect. If you have scheduled a tournament for the coming weeks, it is up to your discretion whether you allow Nadu in your event. This is in effort to help smooth the transition, since we know that word can only travel so quickly. A full effective ban hard line will be August 1st, 2026, after which point any instances of the card Nadu, Winged Wisdom in a Value Vintage deck should be considered a deck registration error for playing cards that are not allowed in the format, and resolved however you would normally resolve such a rules violation. We will be enforcing the ban in MTGO events and similar digital spaces effective immediately.