Magic: The Gathering’s head designer Mark Rosewater has weighed in on the design issues surrounding Nadu, Winged Wisdom, which received a Modern ban on Monday. As well as giving his own take on events, he asks for kindness from fans in return for transparency.
“I truly believe Magic is better as a game because its players have the insight to understand what we, the people making it, are doing,” he wrote on his Blogatog blog on Wednesday, adding, “Please treat the designers who take the time to share with you the behind-the-scenes workings of Magic design with kindness”.
Fans had waited for many weeks, but Nadu, Winged-Wisdom was finally banned on 26 August. Alongside the new MTG banlist came an article about what had gone wrong with the card’s design. It transpired that not only had the final version of Nadu never been playtested, the changes to this card were made with Commander players, not Modern players, in mind.
It’s been the main talking point for Magic: The Gathering fans in this otherwise rather slow news week, which is why Rosewater says he decided to share his thoughts. He offers counterpoints to a lot of the common knee-jerk responses that fans (including us) have had to this article: the feedback that designers shouldn’t make last minute changes, should always playtest cards, and should perhaps stop designing so many cards for Commander outside of dedicated Commander sets.
To the first point, Mark Rosewater says that there are many more last minute catches and fixes than last minute mistakes. “Our process of fixing things up to the last minute does lots and lots of good,” he says.
On playtesting, Rosewater makes a compelling point: “There are tens of millions of you and a handful of us”. He explains that a single minute is the amount of time it takes Magic fans to play an MTG set as much as inhouse playtesters are able to. Designers are “trying to make a balanced environment with thousands of moving pieces a year” so it’s inevitable that some stuff slips through the net.
Tellingly, he reveals that “There simply isn’t time in the day to test everything, so the play design team tests what they think has the highest chance of mattering,” making “calculated gambles” based on experience. I feel like this supports my theory that Wizards of the Coast is too confident that powerful value cards for Commander won’t matter in other formats.
As for designing for Commander, Rosewater says that only a slim number of cards in any set are expected to see competitive play, so it makes sense to consider how they’ll work in other MTG formats. “Us considering the casual ramifications of a card that we didn’t feel was competitively viable is not what broke the card,” he points out.
Above all else, it’s the head designer’s appeal for kindness from fans which sticks out. In writing his Nadu article, MH3’s design lead Michael Majors has taken on responsibility for the mistake, and no doubt attracted plenty of anger from Modern players and the rest of the peanut gallery. “There’s nothing wrong with feedback, but it can be delivered with common courtesy,” Rosewater concludes.
For more content, check out our articles on the best MTG commanders – or swot up on the MTG release schedule.