Nadu, Winged Wisdom Commander Deck Guide

Nadu, Winged Wisdom | Illustration by Daren Bader

Every set brings a slew of new commanders to Magic. Many don’t catch on, but some do. Some open new archetypes or revitalize an old one. Sometimes we’ll add another color to give an archetype the support it needs.

And sometimes we get a pushed card that’s as broken as Humpty Dumpty when he fell off the wall. Let’s checks out one of those broken commanders for an (unsurprisingly) Simic () deck guide: Nadu, Winged Wisdom.

The Deck

Elvish Spirit Guide | Illustration by Anna Steinbauer

This is a combo deck built around Nadu, Winged Wisdom to exploit its incredibly powerful ability. It leans into landfall synergies to build a massive board state before using Craterhoof Behemoth or Finale of Devastation to through your opponents' defenses.

Nadu is a pretty cracked commander, so I put lots of power into the deck. It lacks the critical mass of fast mana and instant speed interaction to be a cEDH list but earns the high-power moniker, so I can’t recommend it for casual tables.

The Commander: Nadu, Winged Wisdom

Nadu, Winged Wisdom has a dizzyingly powerful ability that produces incredible card advantage. The deck maximizes its power with a bunch of landfall synergies and cards that target your creatures for little to no mana.

Nadu sits at the center of this deck. All this deck tries to do is to get as many triggers as possible to draw more cards and play more lands than your opponents. It’s possible to untap on turn 5 with as many as 10 lands, and I even scraped together some kills on turns 3 or 4 in testing.

Nadu Support

The cards that target your creatures for little to no mana are among the most crucial. The first card players thought of when they saw Nadu was Lightning Greaves, for good reason; you get to target all of your creatures twice each for no mana! Shuko and Umbral Mantle provide the same value.

I had never seen Sylvan Paradise and Sea Kings' Blessing before building this deck, but they feel like they were designed specifically for it. You can get some niche value out of changing the colors of creatures, perhaps by messing up a Bloom Tender, but make no mistake: These are often Ancestral Recall or better since they can target all your creatures for 1 mana. Sway of Illusion fills a similar role for extra mana and it comes with one extra card.

Aphetto Alchemist, Kiora's Follower, and Forensic Researcher untap your creatures while drawing tons of cards with The One Ring.

Unctus, Grand Metatect lets you pay life to target your creatures. Or mana, though I prefer using life when I can. Unctus often feels like a set-up piece to use until you find Shuko to pop off.

Hidden Strings sits at the lower end of the target cards in this deck, but it still has a place. It gets two triggers, and you can cipher this with Nadu to get several extra triggers a turn.

Bristly Bill, Spine Sower, and Roaring Earth pull double duty as an enabler for Nadu and reward for putting extra lands in play. Every land you hit gets an extra trigger, and it doesn’t take too many counters for Nadu, Winged Wisdom to become a fearsome flying foe.

Landfall

Once you have your billion Nadu triggers, you need something to do with all the free lands you put into play. Untapped, I might add. These landfall cards keep the good times flowing.

Lotus Cobra, Nissa, Resurgent Animist, and Tireless Provisioner double the mana you get. Nissa has the added benefit of snagging an extra creature the second time it triggers. Most of the elves in the deck are Llanowar Elves variants, so you can easily cast them for two more triggers.

Creating tokens off landfall triggers might be the best way to use Nadu; when every land pumps out another token, you get two more looks at another land to keep the chain going. Springheart Nantuko is a new addition to the format that looks promising, even if this deck doesn’t care much for the bestow ability. Zendikar's Roil is a classic. But the best version of this effect is undoubtedly Scute Swarm since it grows exponentially after you’ve hit your sixth land. This, Nadu, and Shuko almost always win.

Tatyova, Benthic Druid can be slow, but the card advantage helps you grind when you can't go fast, plus the incidental life gain adds up over time.

Tutors

You’re a combo deck with a handful of necessary pieces, so I packed the list with plenty of tutors. The two most important cards in the deck are Shuko and Scute Swarm, so many of these tutors look for them or redundant versions like Lightning Greaves and Springheart Nantuko.

Trinket Mage finds Shuko, which is already great but can hit some mana rocks like Sol Ring and Mana Vault for mana acceleration.

Tribute Mage only has two hits, but they’re quite important. Lightning Greaves enables us while Spellskite provides vital protection for Nadu and other pieces.

Green Sun's Zenith, Invasion of Ikoria, Finale of Devastation, and Chord of Calling don’t just find your essential creatures, they put them into play for you. Finale gets bonus points as a win condition later in the game.

Dizzy Spell often tutors up Shuko, but it can also find countermagic, protection spells, and card draw in Sylvan Paradise and Mystic Remora.

A transmuted Muddle the Mixture finds everything. Token production in Springheart Nantuko, a finisher in Thassa's Oracle, assorted countermagic, several enablers, and even other tutors like Finale of Devastation if you need something more specific.

Whir of Invention primarily finds your equipment, though you can snag The One Ring. You won’t get protection, but you have enough ways to untap TOR that it could result in drawing a lot of cards.

Crop Rotation’s primary target is Field of the Dead, but this deck has many other options.

Tutoring Urza's Saga turns this into a roundabout Shuko tutor.

Dryad Arbor, Mishra's Factory, and Blinkmoth Nexus become two more Nadu triggers.

Talon Gates of Madara protects your creatures or disrupts opposing ones.

Yavimaya Hollow can protect one of your creatures.

Tolaria and other value lands create Nadu triggers.

Interaction

This deck has plenty of interaction to protect its combos and prevent other people from winning faster than it. Simic decks excel at protecting their permanents thanks to a combination of countermagic and “target creature gets hexproof” effects.

Tamiyo's Safekeeping, Tyvar's Stand, and Slip Out the Back protect Nadu and other combo pieces from stray spot removal while getting a second trigger. Legolas's Quick Reflexes takes this even further by providing a potential kill spell.

Spellskite provides easily tutorable protection that also synergizes with your commander; activating Spellskite’s ability makes it the target of, say, a Swords to Plowshares aimed at your commander, providing yet another trigger.

The deck puts tons of lands into play, making Sylvan Safekeeper a solid protective piece, though shroud means whatever creature you save can’t become the target of Shuko shenanigans.

The countermagic suite includes staples like An Offer You Can't Refuse, Swan Song, and Mana Drain. This deck’s power level is high enough to justify a bit of free countermagic in Fierce Guardianship and Force of Will. Veil of Summer isn’t quite a counterspell, but it’s close enough.

Dosan the Falling Leaf provides broad protection on your turn to combo off. It can’t stop channel abilities from cards like Otawara, Soaring City, but it shuts down any countermagic or spot removal.

Rapid Hybridization and Pongify pick off opposing creatures. These are best saved for cards like Collector Ouphe or Thalia, Heretic Cathar that majorly disrupt your combo turns.

Oko, Thief of Crowns shuts down opposing commanders and stax pieces while adding creatures for Nadu every other turn. It can even trigger Nadu in a pinch.

Cyclonic Rift makes a pretty good case for being one of Commander’s best board wipes. This deck ramps hard enough for this bomb to be even more exceptional.

The Mana Base

The ramp package focuses on mana dorks since they get more triggers. You have pretty much every Llanowar Elves variant in your color identity. For mana rocks, there’s a little fast mana in Sol Ring, Mana Vault, and Chrome Mox.

When it comes to the mana base, there’s a bunch of exceptional value lands. The omnipresent Boseiju, Who Endures and Otawara, Soaring City allow your interaction pack to include lands. Urza's Saga finds Shuko with a little time and Field of the Dead fills in as a redundant Scute Swarm effect.

Mishra's Factory, Blinkmoth Nexus, and Dryad Arbor are all lands you can put into play with Nadu, and they either are or become creatures to keep the chain going.

Minamo, School at Water's Edge, Okina, Temple to the Grandfathers, Pendelhaven, and Tolaria all target your creatures for little to no mana. Yavimaya Hollow has the most relevant ability since it can save your creatures.

The rest of the mana base fixes your mana. Thanks to the utility lands, you have no trouble hitting seven unique lands; there are no duplicates (which is why the deck runs one Island and one Snow-Covered Island).

The Strategy

You want to look for opening hands that contain acceleration, protection, and either tutors for your combo pieces or, ideally, those combo pieces. This deck is all-in on the combo. Going off by turn 5 is easy and turn 4 is achievable. What you’re looking for is quite simple.

A winning board state contains Nadu, Winged Wisdom, Shuko, and Scute Swarm, plus as many creatures as possible. Once you start moving Shuko around, you hit some lands. Every land you hit gives you two more looks at another land, which gives you another creature, and so on. This is trivial with Scute Swarm since it often makes far more than one creature, giving you way more than two looks.

As you tear through the deck, you hit more cheap creatures you can play in tandem with all the tokens you make; the landfall, make a mana creatures make this easier. As you keep drawing, you’ll eventually amass a massive board state and drop Craterhoof Behemoth or Finale of Devastation with all the mana you’ve produced thanks to those lands entering untapped. You can even draw through to Thassa's Oracle.

Because some of these pieces are essential—primarily the 0-equip cost artifact and a token producer—those have to be your priorities when casting tutors. Use your interaction reactively to keep your pieces safe. The deck relies on Nadu doing busted things, so don’t let anybody clip its wings.

One crucial aspect of the deck you need to keep in mind is that this combo is nondeterministic. This isn’t something like Kenrith, the Returned King and Composite Golem where you can say “I take this game action a million times to make four million mana, do this to draw my deck, then kill you.” You need to go through each trigger. The deck can whiff, though the more creatures you have the less likely it becomes (and whiffing isn't the end of the world since it typically involves hitting eight nonland cards in a row). This creates very long turns; I heavily recommend goldfishing the list a couple of times to figure out a quick way to resolve triggers so your opponents don’t watch you play solitaire for too long.

Combos and Interactions

This deck builds a combo engine around Nadu, Winged Wisdom; it doesn’t have any specific two-card combos, though it has some interactions I want to clear up.

Firstly, while each of your creatures gains the triggered ability Nadu, Winged Wisdom shares, Nadu is the source of that ability. If your opponents remove Nadu, or Nadu doesn’t hit the board, you don’t get the triggers. The flip side of this is that if you play a second Nadu or flicker the first one, it counts as a new object, giving the ability to your creatures all over again. Displacer Kitten thus resets Nadu, letting you get even more than two triggers per creature, because that wasn’t unreasonable enough already.

Nadu triggers whenever any player targets one of your creatures with a spell or ability, so you’ll always get a two-for-one. The Nadu trigger goes on the stack after the spell targeting it, so it always resolves first. You should always let the first Nadu trigger resolve before responding; the trigger may give you an untapped land or even draw you into a protection spell.

The same holds for any of your equip or other abilities that trigger Nadu; the Nadu trigger always resolves first. It doesn’t always matter, but it’s important to remember so you keep the stack clear.

Rule 0 Violations Check

Despite not having any infinite combos, this deck sits at a rather high power level. There’s a bunch of tutors to enable a consistent game plan that wins very quickly. You also have free countermagic and fast mana, neither of which tend to sit well at casual tables. I wouldn’t take this to a casual pod, though it could likely tussle with mid-powered decks.

Budget Options

This deck can make quite a few budget cuts. The land base is always an excellent place to make cuts, especially one with this many utility lands. You can cut fetches and untapped duals for gates and the like. If you keep Field of the Dead, try to maintain a high unique land count with budget fetches like Brokers Hideout and split your basics between regular and snow-covered lands.

The free countermagic can go in favor of cheaper counterspells like Delay and Arcane Denial.

Sea Kings' Blessing and Sylvan Paradise are absurdly expensive since they saw a single print in Legends. They don’t have good replacements, unfortunately; go for additional card draw like Sylvan Library.

Mana Vault and Chrome Mox can be swapped for regular mana rocks like the on-color Talisman and Signet.

Destiny Spinner can work as a replacement for Dosan the Falling Leaf which protects you against countermagic.

You can run almost any Overrun effect over Craterhoof Behemoth; it’s just the best.

Other Builds

No matter how you build Nadu, it’s going to be a little broken; that’s just how the card was designed. If you want to take a more casual route, it would be an excellent Voltron commander. Making all of your auras and equipment cantrip minimizes the downsides of the archetype, and I believe Simic is one of the best color pairs at protecting a single permanent.

You could also build it as more of a Simic landfall/value deck. My build goes hard on the combo elements, but you could shave away tutors and increase the ramp package to support cards like Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait, Greensleeves, Maro-Sorcerer, and Roil Elemental to push the deck towards a Simic value pile. It would slow the deck down but would also make it less reliant on Nadu and thus more resilient.

Commanding Conclusion

Blinkmoth Nexus | Illustration by Sam Burley

In a set filled with incredibly powerful cards and exciting commanders, Nadu, Winged Wisdom, is well-positioned to go down as the strongest commander from Modern Horizons 3. It’s certainly gotten plenty of discussion and hype!

Do you think Nadu will be the strongest MH3 commander? Would you have gone all-in on combo like I did here? Let me know in the comments below or on the Draftsim Discord!

Stay safe, and thanks for reading!