Mumbling About Nadu

07/02/2024

So. I guess at this point I'm pretty good at Constructed, huh. I've mostly thought of myself as a Limited expert, but apparently I have the best Constructed record during Swiss rounds of this year's PTs combined.

I think a big part of this is that I'm quite good at deck selection. Both of the decks I brought to PT MKM and PT OTJ. And certainly PT MH3 was no different - what better deck to bring to PT Nadu than Nadu itself?

It's fairly obvious at this point that Nadu won't be around for much longer. It had a 60% winrate at the PT despite being 25% of the metagame and a very known element going in, and has play-patterns that many have described as atrocious (non-deterministic combo lines involving moving many game objects around).

In fact, it's so obvious that the price of Nadu has gone down after its success, not up. There's a lot of expectation that Nadu willed get banned, and possibly even emergency banned.

So, this article will be a bit less focused on the exact details of actually playing Nadu - mostly this means no sideboard guide - and a bit more focused on the process of why we made the deckbuilding choices we did on Sanctum.

---

Part 0: The Nadu Combo

For those not in the know, a very brief summary of Nadu combo:

Essentially, you use

Nadu, Winged Wisdom and either Shuko or Outrider en-Kor to generate two Nadu triggers per creature you have. You can keep playing creatures as you draw cards and put lands into play to continue generating more triggers, and can eventually put several copies of Springheart Nantuko into play to make it so you're generating enough free creatures that you can draw your deck.

Winning after that point is fairly trivial - many MTGO lists use

Thassa's Oracle for the sake of simplicity and clock, but if you're up for it I would recommend using various complex Endurance loops instead. I won't get too much into in detail in this article, but that you can find detailed explanations in this Google Doc.

---

Part 1: Mumble

Out of all of the Nadu lists at the PT, Sanctum's were some of the most unique. There were plenty of differences between various lists, with some people even playing black as a fourth color - but the five of us playing Nadu on Sanctum were the only people in the whole PT who registered the card Malevolent Rumble in Modern!

This was honestly a little bit surprising to me, as Malevolent Rumble (or Mumble, as I'll refer to it from here) was basically the first card we got excited for during spoilers. Basically as soon as we saw it, I distinctly remember cftsoc commenting that it was "basically ponder" - after all, it looks at 4 cards and only costs (net) 1 mana!

Mumble went straight into a lot of our early decks of various archetypes - most notably Nadu and 4c Phlage piles. It didn't really quite end up fitting anywhere else, but it was perfect for Nadu.

Not only does it find all of your combo pieces (though it does miss on

Chord of Calling), it also provides a creature to help pay for Chord and produce Nadu triggers.

It even helps fill the graveyard for

Shifting Woodland! In fact, I think the moment I became locked on Nadu was when we figured out how much better Mumble made Woodlands - it just gives the deck so much more resiliency into interactive matchups, letting it combo so much easier through multiple pieces of disruption.

---

Part 2: Grazer, Gardens, Saga

A big point of contention in our early days of working on Nadu was what 1-drop accelerant to play. It was clear that we wanted something, but every choice had its upsides and downsides.

Delighted Halfling was nice for making Nadu uncounterable, but the colorless mana could be awkward to spend. Noble Hierarch and Birds of Paradise were very nice for smooth mana fixing, but were extremely bad into opposing Orcish Bowmasters.

In the end, though, we asked a simple question: what are we actually accelerating towards?

Of course, acceleration in general is nice for a combo deck trying to win as early as turn 3. But the deck was in a weird spot where you couldn't really win any earlier than turn 3 anyways - it's very hard to get both Nadu and Shuko in play by turn 2 - so actually playing Nadu on turn 2 wasn't even that important.

Instead, the expensive spell in the deck was interestingly Chord of Calling. So what 1-drop accelerant works best with that? The almighty sloth itself: Arboreal Grazer!

Every other 1-drop only accelerates you once towards Chord - they all tap for 1 mana for it. But Grazer actually accelerates you twice, by both being a body for convoke and letting you be one land ahead of schedule!

Grazer then also subsidizes another card that is excellent with Chord -

Khalni Garden. A mono-colored tapland can be rough, but is much more reasonable if your second land is generally put into play tapped anyways. The Gardens also function extremely well during the Nadu combo lines, as they serve as free extra creatures you can hit off of Nadu triggers, generating two more triggers at no other cost!

And speaking of subsidizing lands, Grazer is also a turn 1 acceleration piece that works with one of the best lands in the deck -

Urza's Saga. One of the strongest play patterns with Saga in this deck is to play it on turn 1, so that it finds a Shuko at no cost on turn 3 so you can immediately play a Nadu and start comboing. However, this requires to play it on turn 1, which is quite costly to do with a colorless land. But Grazer lets you have your cake and eat it too - you can play an untapped green source to cast Grazer, and still put in the Saga!

---

Part 3: Springheart Nantuko

When I first saw this card being put in Nadu decks, I thought it was a cute but unnecessary combo piece. I saw most people talking about it as a way to kill with Endurance loops - specifically, if you bestow an

Endurance with it, you can then make infinite copies of Endurance, which lets you loop your deck by sacrificing lands to Sylvan Safekeeper and repeatedly shuffling those lands back in.

So initially I was low on it. There were many ways to kill your opponent when you can draw your entire deck, you really didn't need to do a fully infinite Endurance deck-loop. Surely you didn't need to play a 2 mana 1/1, when you can simply repeatedly evoke Endurnace instead, right?

But as I played more with the card, I realized just how good it was at doing everything the deck wanted. Sure it wasn't necessary for the actual kill, but that was only one of five different roles it actually plays!

First of all, it's the single best way to ensure your Nadu combo actually draws through your deck. At the start we were trying to use blink effects on Nadu or Chording for a second Nadu to reset Nadu and chain that way, but with Nantuko all of that is unnecessary - one copy in play while you're comboing often lets you get far enough that you can find a second, and the second copy basically guarantees that you'll draw your entire deck. Turns out getting more free Nadu triggers without having to spend mana is really good!

Secondly, it's also just an amazing accelerant for one of the best cards in the deck: Chord of Calling. Simply playing it before your land drop means it's mana-neutral for Chord (it costs 2 mana and represents 2 creatures that can convoke) - and if your land is a fetchland it's actually mana-positive as 3 bodies for 2 mana! We had been

Wall of Roots for a while for similar reasons of being great with Chord, but Nantuko is kind of just better at that job.

Nantuko is also just really nice for the fair part of games. An army of 1/1s isn't the most fearsome boardstate you've ever seen, but it can legitimately get there when your opponent is forced to spend resources interacting with your combo, and chumps quite well to boot! And that's only the default baseline of Nantuko - bestowing it can do so much more than that. A Nantuko on an Endurance or a Saga Construct can start to represent quite a meaningful clock; and bestowing it on your own hatepiece like

Drannith Magistrate, Suncleanser, or even Haywire Mite can start to lock some decks out of the game!

All of this is to say, Nantuko is probably the card that I've gained the most respect for throughout testing. It does everything above, and so much more random small things to boot - from triggering Nadu when bestowed, to being an enchantment for Woodland delirium, to being a threat that's resilient to creature removal when bestowed. It's kind of the perfect card for the deck with all the roles it fills, and I don't think I would ever want to register fewer than the full 4 copies.

---

Part 4: Nadu Triggers, and Sylvan Safekeeper

The core tenet of the deck is, of course, to assemble Nadu and a way to trigger it repeatedly. This mostly involves the card Shuko, plus Outrider as an instant-speed way to trigger Nadu that is also Chordable. You're an A+B combo deck, so you want to have as many copies of A, B, and ways to find them as you can.

This is the reasoning behind why many people were playing 1-2 copies of

Bristly Bill, Spine Sower. It's technically a way to generate Nadu triggers, though it is capped by how many times you can trigger Landfall. But more importantly, it's a green creature that you can get off of Summoner's Pact that helps in this regard - something that isn't true of Shuko or Outrider. On top of all of that, it's an okay fair-game card, letting you grow your creatures large enough to represent a meaningful beatdown plan.

However, despite all of this, we were never that enamored with Bristly Bill on Sanctum. Yes, it was useful in various situations, but we found that there was a card that just did its job better; one that people were already playing, but seemed to be underestimating still: Sylvan Safekeeper.

The obvious use-case for this card is just as nice free protection for your combo - one that you can Chord for, no less. It was seeing play for that reason, and also because it let you do Endurance loops by letting you sacrifice lands to shuffle them back into your deck with Endurance to get more Nadu and Nantuko triggers.

But on top of all of that, it's also just the best alternative Nadu trigger source! Sacrificing lands sounds like a big cost, but if you think about it, it does just as much as Bristly Bill, if not more. Every land you hit off of Nadu is a Bill trigger, but it's also another land you can sacrifice to Safekeeper. Bill lets you get more triggers from fetching, but Safekeeper also lets you get more triggers by eating into the few lands you already have in play.

The biggest thing, though, is that Safekeeper can immediately function as soon as you play your Nadu. Bill needs you to trigger landfall to start going, and fizzles as soon as you hit a bunch of nonlands - Safekeeper can start on its own with the lands you have in play, and you can choose how far you're willing to push. It's just that small bit better at digging towards a real combo piece (often either Shuko, Chord, or lands to cast those), and serves a much more important side function of combo protection - all while being 1 mana cheaper!

So, we chose to play 2 Safekeepers instead of 1, and no copies of Bristly Bill.

---

Part 5: The Combo Slot

As I said above, there are many many ways to win the game once you draw your deck, and the specifics are mostly an afterthought. But since we were already interested in playing Safekeepers and Nantukos for the aforementioned reasons, and Endurance as just a nice fair card that could sometimes accelerate a Chord by being pitch-cast, I was pretty set against

Thassa's Oracle - Endurance loops just seemed like a much more efficient use of deck space, and didn't require playing a 2 mana 1/3.

That said, some of the cards I considered in this slot weren't necessarily better. I flirted with playing a card like

Consign to Dream or Resounding Wave for a bit - the idea being that you could Endurance loop it to bounce all your opponent's permanents - but the final version of that was a single copy of Venser, Shaper Savant.

As a combo piece, the idea is that you can bestow Nantuko on it during your Endurance loop in order to bounce all your opponent's permanents. And as a fair card, it has some nice properties of letting a Chord for X=4 deal with any permanent or spell on the stack - I never got to use it to delay a wrath, but I won a game by bouncing a Phlage with it, and won a mirror game by bouncing a Chord for Nadu with it.

There is some argument that the combo slot can simply be playing one copy of Boseiju and one copy of Otawara in your manabase - there is in fact a way to loop these, which lets you get your opponent down to only having basic lands in play. But Venser is a good enough card to play anyways, and Otawara is actually fairly hard to fit into the manabase - so mostly this means you can generally side out the Venser when it's not good.

---

Part 6: Hatebears and Flexslots

The last few slots in the deck, plus basically all of the sideboard, are all tuned towards the metagame I expected.

Volatile Stormdrake is for the mirror, as Chordable removal that can turn an opponent's Nadu into yours.

Drannith Magistrate is mostly for Storm with a bit of Living End splash damage.

Suncleanser and The One Ring exist to combat Jeskai, though the maindeck is already decent at that with two copies of Endurance and more resiliency thanks to Mumble/Woodland.

Titania, Protector of Argoth is a backup plan to fight extraction effects.

Consign to Memory is, of course, for various Tron or Eldrazi variants - and specifically because the card Karn, the Great Creator can be scary.

Force of Vigor and Dismember are interaction pieces for the mirror, though Dismember is a bit wider in its applications.

Swan Song is just really good right now as combo protection - it's even okay in the mirror, as it doesn't counter Nadu/Shuko but gets everything else important!

There are many cards you can play in these flexslots, and many different sideboard configurations you can use. I'm not sure exactly what the metagame will look like going forward - there might be more Necro, so you might want more

Veil of Summer and Vexing Bauble - but your choices should be heavily shaped by what you expect.

Amusingly, one card that I would count as a "flexslot" that others might instead call "core" is

Summoner's Pact. Specifically, I dislike that it only really contributes towards speed, and hurts your resiliency - but if you're expecting a lot of mirrors, it's probably good to play a couple, even with the Mumble plan.

---

Conclusion: The Final Deck

In the end, I am extremely happy with how our deck turned out. I think if I were to play the tournament again, I would make all of the same choices for the core cards. I had many non-mirror opponents comment on our build being much scarier and resilient than all the other Nadu lists floating around, and I think that was a good place to be.

We put up the results to show for it too - out of the four of us that registered roughly this Bant Nadu list (me, Nicole, Etienne, and Nate), we went 8-1, 7-3, 6-3-1, and 6-3-1 for a nice 69% winrate!

Going forward, the only things I would change really are the flexslots. With Storm falling out of favor and Nadu presumably gaining in popularity, it probably makes sense to at least turn the maindeck Drannith Magistrate into a Pact for more speed - and the sideboard could use a lot of reworking for a now more-known meta.

And honestly, that's a great feeling. Basically my only regret from this testing season was not pushing quite hard enough to get even more of the team onto Nadu - I think we correctly picked up on the broken deck for the PT, and put in the effort to have the best list in the room, with significant innovations over what was "stock" online at the time.

So until the next Modern PT next year, that'll be all from me for Modern. Happy Nadu'ing!

---

PS: here's a bonus Python script that I used to simulate Nadu comboing. I'm too lazy to explain exactly how it works, and it is definitely hacked together in a few janky ways, but I figure I'd put it here in case anyone was interested - feel free to do whatever you want with it.