trickle-down misery in penny dreadful

if you follow magic: the gathering at all you’ll have heard about the insanity of last week, in which the rules committee for edh/commander, a (theoretically) fun, social, multiplayer format, banned a number of cards that made the format substantially less fun. unfortunately, because these are magic players we’re talking about, those cards were very popular in commander, and thus very expensive. the bans caused the cards in question to immediately lose a massive amount of value on the secondary market, and, again because these are magic players we’re talking about, resulted in members of the rules committee receiving death threats. in the end, wizards of the coast, who are responsible for the inflated value of these cards in the first place, took over the management of the format.

all obviously very stupid and bad, but it’s generally good for normal people when cards aren’t obscenely expensive. what’s surprising in this case, though, is that one of the cards banned on the 23rd lost so much value that it’s come full circle to cause chaos in an entirely different format.

nadu, winged wisdom might seem odd but not obviously broken on first read, until you remember that

1. it applies to all your creatures
2. there are equipments that cost 0 to equip, and equipping is a targeted ability
3. landfall exists

very absurd things follow, and also very slow things; resolving all the triggers that result from juggling your equipment from creature to creature takes a long time, and unlike other slow combos, isn’t even guaranteed to win you the game. it was this combination of slowness and uncertainty that makes playing against nadu especially loathsome, and why it’s banned in commander (as well as in modern).

but because it’s been banned in the two formats where it was viable, it’s now worth so little that it has become legal in an unofficial format called penny dreadful.

penny dreadful is a community-run format where the legality of a card depends on its price. originally only cards that cost, on average, the equivalent of one US cent on magic: the gathering online (not to be confused with mtg arena) were legal; currently the cap has been raised to two pennies. after a new set comes out, the prices of all cards are monitored over the next week; cards whose average value is below 2¢ during that period are legal until the next set.

nadu was banned just before the most recent set came out. nadu’s value tanked. nadu is now legal in penny dreadful, and it’s already decimating the metagame.

fortunately the format is somewhat self-correcting; if a card becomes too popular, its value will rise, and it will stop being legal after the next rotation. of course, if nadu ends up being only ever played in this niche format, that might not be sufficient demand to push it back above the the threshold. but it’s extremely fitting, in a dark way, for the health of the poor person’s format to be subject to the whims of the rich assholes warping the magic scene at large.