Modern Horizons shouldn't have Commander-focused design

Nadu, Winged Wisdom is banned. The August 26 announcement finally came and removed from Modern one of the worst card designs of all time and one that - obviously - required an explanation of how they came up with the card and how it was released this way. The paragraphs that stand out in the article where Michael Majors explains how Nadu was created are:

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

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.

Further down, Majors admits:

In short, Nadu, Winged Wisdom was a mistake made due to the design team's concern in creating a card that would be attractive for Commander, but that wouldn't pose a threat to games in the format with its Flash-granting ability, creating an ability that would be attractive to build around, consequently breaking Modern in the process - and the worst-case scenario is that Nadu is also so absurd in the format in which his abilities were focused that conversations about his ban are also common at Commander tables.

In this article, we'll talk a little about set design, Commander and why focusing on Commander in Modern Horizons is a mistake that could cost the health of eternal formats.

In essence, Commander is a multiplayer format in which players have 40 life and play at a table of, typically, four people. This means that games are either very long or leads to some sort of combo that ends the game with your controller winning or your opponents simultaneously losing - cards like Thassa’s Oracle are staples and infinite combos like those in Exquisite Blood and Sanguine Bond are common because they offer efficient ways to win games.

Commander is also a community-driven environment. Tables are built around deck power levels, some want to have fun playing knight typal while others want to make the most absurd play possible on the second turn, and usually these two players won’t talk very well and therefore end up playing at separate tables - your intent in the game is the whole point of a Commander table.

I like to say that the core focus of Commander is to be an eternal format where you can play whatever you want, however you want. Want to bend the established rules of the format and cheat on mana costs? There will be commanders like Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow for you. Want to load up on creatures and play classic beatdown? Winota, Joiner of Forces and Edgar Markov join several other legendary cards for this game plan. Want to make the most nonsensical combo possible and watch it work? There are plenty of options. Load up on permanents to the point where you lose the count of your triggers? Commander Masters’ enchantment precon might be an option for you! An Eldrazi deck? We have plenty of options! Play with cards banned in other formats? Here you have Vampiric Tutor, Demonic Tutor, and other spells considered too strong even for Legacy.

Commander is whatever its play group or the general community wants it to be, and because of that nature, it is extremely popular, to the point of being the most played format in Magic (with caveats from Mark Rosewater, who implies that “kitchen table” is the most played format and that most MTG players probably have no idea what a format is). Consequently, it also receives more and more support from the company: precons that were released once a year now come out with each set and even in complementary expansions like Modern Horizons 3. Sets that were previously Masters with some reprints now even work with the design of mechanics geared towards the format: Initiative came in a Commander Legends.

As evidenced by Michael Majors in his explanation, Commander also strongly affects the design of the main Magic sets. This is nothing new given the addition of legendary cards to each expansion and the way some keywords and card texts have started to use a language more geared towards multiplayer - it is a choice to make the booster product more attractive to its larger audience even when they only need one copy of each card and that is how it should be: Magic is a product to be sold and will continue to be a product throughout its entire life cycle and will cease to exist when it is no longer profitable for Hasbro.

But its players also have their limits. In an interview with the Atog de Toga team (a Brazilian YouTube channel focused on Commander gameplay) during our videocast, they mentioned how one of the most difficult challenges in Commander today is keeping track of everything: we're talking about an average of 30 or more legends for each new set, with expansions coming out 45 to 60 days apart. In addition to the commanders, it's necessary to evaluate the precon decks for each set, considering which ones are worth buying, which cards from the main set are worth buying, and which reprints from the special slots (Breaking News, Mystical Archives, Special Guests, etc.) are important to have in your collection - in the end, it's too much to keep track of, it's a huge overload and a big difference from pre-pandemic periods when there was a batch of decks every year and specific insertions for the format in each new release.

There is no expectation of changes on this regard and Wizards will continue to release Commander products with each set because there is a large demographic of players to consume them and, now that the format is also considered the “gateway” to Magic, it is natural that a wave of precons will come out with each set and equally normal that sets entirely focused on Commander (Legends, Masters, etc.) will become complementary products - but its design philosophy requires limits, and perhaps Modern Horizons is that limit.

Commander is not about playing with super-powerful staples, but about doing absurd things with fun cards

The above sentence is closer to an idealism than to reality, but the essence of Commander since its conception and philosophy is doing absurd things that you can't do in other formats. Want to complete a combo with The Infamous Cruelclaw and Worldfire and make the lives of all the other players a little worse? You can in Commander! Want to play Shirei, Shizo’s Caretaker and make a deck around Shadowborn Apostle? You can in Commander! The format is more fun when you focus on these interactions, and they’re what Commander design should—and often does—focus on.

Even cards that are inherently broken in the format, such as the Partner mechanic or spells that circumvent the format’s own rules, are very valid options to release in Commander products and/or products geared towards the format, and allow for some bolder designs, including mechanics like Initiative, which proved to be too strong for the 1v1 scenario. Despite the questions about whether these cards should be legal in two-player formats, they are good proposals for dedicated sets, but limits also need to be established in Commander, after all:

Commander also suffers from design mistakes and power creep, and much more so than competitive formats

The notorious problem with power creep in Commander and the risk of focusing too much on it in set design is that it makes decks as unviable as it does in other formats. Why would I try any other Knight commander when Sidar Jabari of Zhalfir is better than any of them? Why try another Zombie commander when Wilhelt, the Rotcleaver is the best possible option? The only reason is “I want to play this legend”, which basically makes your deck worse and makes the power level of your pet cards not keep up with even the most casual tables against precons.

And another example can be found in Nadu, Winged Wisdom itself.

Nadu is a broken card and, now, an admitted mistake. If his ability triggered once per turn, he would already be a warning - twice is overkill. In Commander, it falls into an inherently problematic category: that of a legendary to build around in very specific ways that rewards players with extra mana and extra cards, a design that is already known for presenting unfun patterns for the format.

Add some cards that target creatures, enablers like Scute Swarm and Springheart Nantuko or Avenger of Zendikar and you start to build a very solid shell for your build-around, Nadu. Some tutors, ramp, protection, mana dorks and other cards with abilities that target for free and their controller already starts revealing cards every turn cycle, drawing cards and playing enough lands to play Nadu again even if he is removed by one of the opponents - he is a constant threat on the board, enters as early as the second turn in a deck and doesn't need a "combo" to be oppressive at any casual table, besides making games take too long with one player doing everything alone.

Commander has, of course, its fair share of absurd things: Thassa's Oracle can win the game as early as the second turn when accompanied by Demonic Consultation. Stax pieces like Winter Orb create very unpleasant board states and have archetypes entirely dedicated to not allowing your opponents to play, and there are so many combos and mechanics aimed at breaking the format's rules that it's no surprise that there are tables where players don't have fun, and Nadu, Winged Wisdom fits this pattern and is perhaps one of the most powerful engines the format has ever seen.

The difference is that, unlike WotC's management where they ban when necessary even with delays, the committee responsible for Commander is much more conservative with bans and rarely bans something due to cEDH or more competitive tables because they are not the majority of the audience, so interventions are rare and, consequently, problem cards like Thassa's Oracle or Nadu stay longer and/or never leave the format, mainly because the average number of players using them outside competitive tables is minimal.

Nadu should also be banned from Commander

This doesn't mean that MH3's design mistake is okay in Commander. As shown above, Nadu, Winged Wisdom is easy to break, but it has another problem besides this: there is no other way to build a list with it.

Other legendaries that are considered strong or even competitive have some concessions that can be made. While some like Partners stand on their own and don't require excessive deckbuilding, others require more deckbuilding concessions but open up space for lower power levels: you don't need to run infinite combat combos with Najeela, the Blade-Blossom or find the most absurd card possible with Magda, Brazen Outlaw, and you don't need to put Stax pieces into play with Winota, Joiner of Forces for them to work at lower power levels.

Nadu is different. There's only one way to build around him, and you're better off betting on another commander even at a casual table - if a casual table will play against Nadu in the first place - if you don't follow their deckbuilding rules. Even if you swap Lightning Greaves for Swiftfoot Boots or don't use tutors to increase its consistency, it's already a huge target on the board and your deck will hardly work if you don't dedicate slots around it.

It's parasitic and has automatically become the best option in its theme, perhaps the only consistent and viable option in its colors. Three mana is too little, activating twice a turn is too many times, offers the perfect combination of speed, consistency with tutors and cheap protection, and its abilities only offer one avenue of possibilities to win games - therefore, it shouldn't have much space in Commander because it's a mistake even in the format it was designed for, much worse than if it offered flash for permanents.

Modern Horizons products are their own line aimed, as the name suggests, at the Modern format and consequently at Legacy. Many of its cards are designed as callbacks to mechanics and staples from the Reserved List and/or as more daring design proposals that don't fit into Standard's power level. And if there's already debate about how healthy the artificial rotations they cause are, the debate is even worse when the focus of the set's design seems to move away from Modern to think about Commander.

There are exceptions: cards of iconic Magic characters have a hard time appearing in any set and having Urza, Lord High Artificer and Yawgmoth, Thran Physician in the first Modern Horizons were a big draw for lore and Commander fans alike - and both are excellent to build around as their abilities speak to their overall lore in the game's universe. Some have never appeared and are still waiting for their chance, and Modern Horizons is an option for these iconic characters to not only appear as cards but also impact eternal formats like Urza and Yawgmoth did, even if their designs were intended for Commander.

Nadu, Winged Wisdom is a different case because there is no precedent for him to be an iconic character whose abilities speak to pre-established lore. It was just there: a random card designed to respond to interactions and whose design team, at some point, looked at one of its abilities and considered it too strong for Commander, forcing a change that weakened its text lines, but still made it attractive to that audience, demonstrating the failure of the process of needing to focus on Commander even in sets dedicated to other eternal formats.

And it wasn't the only card designed for Commander, it was just the one that went wrong.

MH3 had its wave of legends aimed at the multiplayer format, just like MH2 and also MH1. Unlike its predecessors, Modern Horizons 3 even had Commander precon decks, causing controversy and some confusion about a set having “Modern Horizons” in its name and the cards in its box not being legal in the Modern format

Yes, the idea of ​​having these decks in MH3 to elaborate on the mechanics of the expansion while also opening up proposals that are not possible in the Standard products (Energy, Lhurgoyfs, Devoid) was interesting from a design perspective, but if we had this product dedicated to the Commander audience, why did the main set also need to focus on Commander or was Nadu, Winged Wisdom in the main set instead of being included alongside Omo, Queen of Vesuva as a complementary legend?

Modern Horizons is not just a set where a design team can be more creative and bold, it is an upscaling, the power creep personified in expansion. Trying to bring that same effect to Commander in this product is allocating a part of it to be a bigger risk than it should be in 1v1 formats.

Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis may not have been planned for Commander, but it has all the characteristics of a card designed with the format in mind, and we saw the damage it caused in Modern. Wrenn and Six and the Evokers from MH2, on the other hand, were built around already known mechanics or just as bold proposals that expansions like these allow, and yet they still caused their damage.

In terms of game design, Modern Horizons is very difficult to balance. It is likely that a ban will fall, sooner or later, on some card given the nature of the power creep of these sets, and this is a natural consequence. Thinking too much about Commander in Horizons sets, especially when there is a line of decks focused on the format, is adding another layer of risk to the equation and opens up even more room for the risk of bans and/or formats breaking completely due to - as in the most recent case - inattention to some specific interaction.

Therefore, it would be better for the formats whose true target of the MH category is planned if the design philosophy for Commander stayed further away in these releases.

Universes Beyond is another story

Next year, we will have two products from Universes Beyond that could profoundly change Magic: Final Fantasy, a full set akin to Lord of the Rings and Marvel, which we still don't know what the products will be like. Beyond expansions are a different beast when it comes to game design and competitive formats, and should, ironically, go the opposite direction and affect competitive formats as little as possible.

Because they appeal to a range of people from other IPs, Universes Beyond products are a problem when iconic characters become staples in multiple formats. Cards like The One Ring should be powerful because they are central to the lore of the universe they are set in, but others like Aragorn, the Uniter don't need to affect formats in the same way when the majority of the card's enthusiasts will be Lord of the Rings fans.

The Commander designs tested in Modern Horizons should be applied to other sets, Universes Beyond included, even when they enter Modern because the target audience for this product will be much more interested in collecting or building decks around their favorite character than a competitive format player will be interested in including Frodo in their deck, and it's okay for them if Frodo isn't good enough, so the bold design of cards like Nadu, Winged Wisdom can - and should - be geared towards Universes Beyond products if they're so keen on them making it into Modern.

The Assassin's Creed set is a great example. Despite the criticism surrounding the Beyond Boosters, the expansion speaks incredibly well to itself to the point where we can build casual decks with just the cards from it, the legends speak to the game's lore while being attractive enough for Commander, and few - if any - cards from the set made any difference to the eternal formats outside a few one-off results.

Another example that works in the application of staples for eternal formats is precisely not assigning the Legendary subtype to them to maintain the ease of reprinting them in another product in the future.

Orcish Bowmasters and Delighted Halfling are staples and both can, if necessary and opportune, show up again in another reprint set because their names are generic. This is different from the case of The One Ring which became a Modern staple and is now a difficult card to access because there is no way to reprint the most important piece of Tolkien's work without specific concessions (being a slot on The List as an in-universe version).

Another sentence from the announcement that caught my attention was the beginning of the last paragraph:

And also the last part of the explanation about card design:

I don't have a comprehensive understanding of how Wizards' game design works (and I believe almost no one outside the company really knows the process of creating Magic: The Gathering in depth), but these two statements make me imagine a process similar to that of digital game design, whether electronic or online: the team has a deadline, everything needs to be in accordance with that deadline, and it is not very flexible, leaving room for errors, bugs and other flaws that will only be noticed when the final product is released.

Unlike digital games, however, Magic doesn't have a “patch cycle” where bug fixes and other updates are necessary for the game to run as planned after its release and/or to correct something that was not as planned - in competitive games, this includes rebalancing - so the only solutions are errata or bans.

Magic does not work well with errata. The last time one was necessary for competitive purposes was with Hostage Taker because the original text of the card allowed to exile itself and, consequently, create an infinite loop if there was no other creature in play. If one “may” errata was already too much and led to Amalia Benavides Aguirre’s ban on Pioneer this Monday, what wouldn’t a Nadu errata sacrifice?

So, all that’s left are bans, and as explained in another article, Wizards didn’t make a mistake in keeping the announcement date to August 26th to preserve the integrity of its communication with the public. In addition, the company has committed to working with announcements according to the dates of RCs and RCQs to not intervene in the formats in the middle of the competitive seasons. This will come as a relief to the players of these events, but it will also be a time of more demands and complaints from the game’s online community because, after all, we will have fewer ban announcements during the year.

There is no perfect solution to Magic's problems, and bans are the only way to fix its flaws. It's doubtful that the game's design process, which has worked well for decades, can accommodate more flexible planning and playtesting times, especially in a world where releases are happening more frequently.

This article ended up being more of a rant than I intended. Reading that the mistakes surrounding Nadu, Winged Wisdom were caused by concerns about its viability on Commander left a bad taste for any Modern enthusiast this Monday, and it's strange to think that this creature is broken even in the format it was focused on.

But I still make a commitment as a communicator to see the world as it is and not as I would like it to be, so let's get to the bitter point: the design of Modern Horizons 3 and the Commander-focused intervention on the set may be just another symptom of Hasbro's rampant capitalism with Wizards of the Coast.

The same capitalism that places releases too close together, that removed the localization of Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons from my native language, distanced Latin America from the Spotlight Series, laid off 1,100 employees and even part of the team which worked with Larian Studios on Baldur's Gate 3 the week before Christmas, and also that seems to serve the increase in short-term profits to the detriment of long-term health.

Wizards makes mistakes - it's natural that they make mistakes - but how many of these are being caused by this aggressive profit-maximizing nature that the company has adopted? And how many more mistakes will continue to occur because of this philosophy? And if we are tired, I imagine that the design team - if the planning doesn't help - is too. There is no passion that can hold a game aiming to wring the most out of the pockets and good faith of its customer base every year for long.

Finally, I would like to emphasize the importance that Commander has for the Magic ecosystem. As mentioned above, the format offers a way to play the way you want and with the combination of cards you want without the restrictions of competitive formats - and that is why it is so popular. Another reason is that Commander is a social game, it is closer to a board game than a competitive TCG and can offer the best or worst possible experiences depending on the group of players with whom you sit next to.

There are games where you laugh more in 30 minutes than you did in the entire week, while there are situations like an eye roll when they see Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow as your commander that make you rethink whether you even want to play with these people, but all of this is part of being human - and if Commander has something that other formats sometimes fail to communicate as well due to their competitive nature, it is the humanity of each player. Whether in deckbuilding, in the choice of the commander, or in their behavior - good or bad - during the game.

It is not “less Magic” than any other format, and it is also not “more Magic”; it is another proposal, one more aimed at a larger audience and one that, like Modern or Legacy players, also experiences the effects of power creep, the corporate decisions and overload of releases of the last few years.

Thanks for reading!