Brewing Nadu, Winged Wisdom in cEDH

Nadu, Winged Wisdom

by Daren Bader

Nadu is one of the most anticipated cards in MH3, and with good reason. It's a relatively huge, cheap creature that kind of protects itself and your other creatures that also happens to combo with almost anything in a way that can result in basically putting your entire deck onto the battlefield in a single turn. Some of the cards it combos best with aren't very good if you don't have Nadu, which makes it especially appealing as a commander, since you always have access to it.

Despite the fact that I'm writing this shortly before the MH3 prerelease, I've both already played a good number of games with Nadu as my commander and have looked at several other players' takes on the deck, and I'm pretty happy with my list. I'll explain how the deck works as I explain my card choices; let's just get into it.

Nadu Targeters

Nadu triggers when you target your creatures, so you want cards that do that efficiently. We're not looking for cards like Mutagenic Growth

The easiest way to repeatedly target all of your creatures is with Equipment that can equip for free. I'm playing only the most efficient options. Many other players choose to include Umbral Mantle

Paradise Mantle

These creatures have activated abilities that target your creatures. Unctus is extremely important to the deck because it's a "free" target effect that you can find with creature tutors, so it gives you a lot more access to that kind of card. Additionally, the ability to draw and discard a card whenever a blue creature becomes tapped can allow you to loot through your entire deck to find the perfect cards. Elvish Herder

This means that, if someone kills the Elvish Herder

These only generate a finite number of triggers, but they're still among the most powerful cards in the deck because they require no additional setup. If you have one of these and Nadu, you can tap it to untap itself twice on your turn, then twice on each other players' turn, and on the last turn before you untap, you can also target a different creature, which gives you nine Nadu triggers per turn rotation, so your best start is often just to play one of these, then Nadu, and if no one has removal, you'll probably win on your following turn.

These also open up a few other combos. If you have either of these with Unctus, as alluded to above, you can tap and untap them as many times as you want to loot through your whole deck. Note that this works with Seeker of Skybreak

These cards protect your other cards, which is valuable, but they can also generate Nadu triggers. When you redirect something to Spellskite

Sylvan Safekeeper

Bristly Bill gives you a free, instant-speed target effect whenever a land enters, which is perfect, because Nadu will put lands onto the battlefield, so every time you hit a land, you get to go again as long as you have a creature that hasn't already been targeted twice; fetch lands let you go two more times. In many ways, Nadu is a Landfall deck, and Bristly Bill is the first piece of that.

Because this is limited to once each turn, it's not very explosive, but it's a pretty good card in a deck with creatures that tap for mana, and it can activate on each turn, so it's probably worth playing, but I'd understand trimming it. I think it's the least essential card in this class of cards.

These cards are broken in this deck. They're my favorite targeters because they're impossible to interact with. When you put one on the stack, you've already targeted everything you want and generated a Nadu trigger for each target, so it doesn't really matter if your opponent has any kind of response. March of Swirling Mist

My basic gameplan is just to get as many creatures onto the battlefield as I can, then cast one of these for 5+ and hope that gives me enough cards and mana to assemble a combo that lets me go through my whole deck. I've heard that some people aren't sold on these from their goldfishing of the deck because they don't quickly present a win by themselves, but when you're actually playing against opponents who try to interact with you, these become the best cards in the deck.

Those are the 15 cards I choose to play that let me go off with Nadu, and I'm generally looking to have at least one of them or a way to find one of them in any opening hand, though it's not strictly required if the hand is otherwise broken (such as any hand with Rhystic Study

Creatures to Target

In order to get started, you need ways to target your creatures; in order to keep going, you need more creatures to target.

These are the cards that fully allow you to combo. Once you have a free way to target creatures, you'll "draw" two cards for each creature you control (notably Nadu doesn't draw, which means it ignores cards like Narset, Parter of Veils

These cards are all essential, and I wouldn't think about cutting any of them. You're always trying to find at least one of them to go off with.

At this point I should probably get around to explaining what this deck actually does and how it wins.

Your basic play pattern is to set up Nadu with a way to target things, then start targeting things to get more mana and cards, which can let you find more efficient ways to target things, and one of these cards that gives you more things to target, and maybe a card that lets you transition from treading water to going big. Pause, let me introduce those cards:

Going Big

Lotus Cobra

Any of these cards make it easy to transition to your end game, though you can still do it without them. Incidentally, other lists I've seen don't include Sakashima or Spark Double

Anyway, with these cards, we can get to our end game, so what is that?

Nadu Wincons

We make a bunch of creatures and target all of them and draw through our entire deck. At that point, we need to kill the table. The easy way to do this is by casting a big Finale of Devastation

Some players like Endurance

Recursion

Noxious Revival

The Backup Win

With Displacer Kitten

Each time you do this, your Landfall cards will generate more creatures for you to target. You can do the same thing with any other land instead of Cradle to make other colors of mana. Once you have infinite mana, you can do the same thing with Cephalid Coliseum

The Lands

Ordinarily, I don't really get into all the lands I'm playing; they're mostly just there to cast your spells, and the best ones are pretty well established. This deck plays an unusually high number of lands because you're generally hoping to hit lands with Nadu triggers, and a lot of the lands do interesting things. The land choices are a lot more difficult with this deck than most, and a lot of the most important cards are lands, like the aforementioned Gaea's Cradle

Fetchlands

This is a Landfall deck, so you need to play all the good fetchlands that are available to you. However, because we want to play so many fetchlands and we see so many cards, it's possible to run out of lands we can find, so we want to play a few extras to be safe:

Fetchable Lands

I'm tempted to include Snow-Covered Island

Creature Lands

When you get set up with a free way to target creatures, you're limited only by the number of creatures you have. This means that any land you hit that either generates creatures or can become a creature, you have two more triggers, making these extremely valuable. There are a lot of creature lands to choose from, but I went with Mishra's Factory

Targeting Lands

Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers

Other Interesting Nadu Lands

Some tables will repeatedly counter or kill Nadu, so the tax can get high enough that Command Beacon

Shifting Woodland

Urza's Saga

This deck plays enough colorless lands that Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth

The Rest of the Deck

The cards above cover the unique aspects of Nadu. The rest of the deck is just "cards that let you play a game of cEDH": you need fast mana because that's how cEDH works and you need extra creatures to target, so the deck is playing Birds of Paradise

Notable Omissions and Inclusions

I'm playing Merchant Scroll

I'm playing Chain of Vapor

I typically don't like Force of Negation

I'm not playing Roaring Earth

Strengths and Weaknesses of the Deck

The core strength of the deck is its resilience, as is often the case with green decks. You have a lot of recursion and redundancy, and a lot of the times that people try to interact with you it just feeds you more cards. Given time, you can keep presenting ways to churn through your deck until something sticks.

The deck has a few key weaknesses. First, you're very reliant on your commander, so cards like Drannith Magistrate

The deck also draws a lot of heat. In fact, it draws so much heat that it inspired me to really think about this concept as a way to evaluate decks in a way I hadn't before: Nadu has a play pattern where you need a lot of pieces in play, what you're doing is very obvious, and there are clear interaction points. You present non-deterministic wins, but there'll be situations where, once you start going, it'll become harder and harder for your opponents to interact as you get going. This forces them to cut you off before you get started in a way that drains the table's interaction before anyone, including you, is really trying to win. You end up trading a lot of cards one-for-one in the early game as your opponents are forced to target your stuff, which is frustrating as a Nadu player, but really their only option.

For all of the deck's explosive turns, it's not ultimately that fast. You're not racing Rograkh decks, you don't have Dockside Extortionist

The deck needs multiple creatures on the battlefield in order to function. Nadu is good against targeted removal, but if someone resolves an actual sweeper, it can be really hard to recover.

After testing the deck quite a bit, I think it's powerful, but I've decided not to play it in tournaments for now because of these weaknesses. I suspect it's ultimately best played as a bit more of a reactive deck, but I want to get that way gradually as I find other cards that are underperforming. If I had to identify the flex slots now, I'd say Quirion Ranger

The full list is available here.