Simon Nielsen, who triumphed at the weekend’s MTG Pro Tour with a Nadu Bant deck, has suggested that the powerful strategy should be banned. “This deck is just crazy stupid, and I’m glad I got to play it before it’s gone, because it’s going to be gone,” he said, when he was presented with his trophy, on June 30.
“Do not invest,” he added – a jokey reference to the enormous number of price spikes we’ve seen driven by this card. From Shuko to Dosan – there are a lot of very expensive MTG cards that have Nadu to thank for their newfound prestige. It seems the Pro Tour winner thinks Nadu should be on the MTG banlist – which would presumably see many of these niche cards plummet in value.
Pro Tour Modern Horizons 3 took place at MagiCon Amsterdam between June 28 – 30, and saw 243 players battling it out in Draft and Modern Constructed formats.
As everyone expected, Nadu decks dominated the field. Nadu Bant was the most popular strategy, and 25% of players were running Nadu decks, but the strategy was still disproportionately successful. There were five Nadu players in the top eight and the finals was a mirror match.
As the last banlist update was on June 24 (there were no changes for any formats), we’ll likely be waiting a while to see if Nadu gets the chop, as the next scheduled ban announcement is in August.
Interestingly, Nadu was mentioned in the June 24 update, but Wizards determined that “although Nadu, Winged Wisdom has raised some early concerns, it appears the Modern format has proven it has tools to fight it, with its results over Modern Leagues and Challenges starting to stabilize over the last few days as the format continues to adapt.”
The Pro Tour results seem to fly in the face of this analysis.
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