Dack Fayden, Helping Hand | Blink Deck Tech

Dack Fayden, Helping Hand | Art by Josiah “Jo” Cameron

There are commanders that reward an archetype by giving you something directly for doing what it wants to be doing. Whenever you sacrifice a permanent, draw a card. Whenever you cast an Adventure, copy it. That sort of thing.

I love those kinds of commanders, but it is refreshing to see a commander that interacts with the archetype without just directly calling it out. Today’s legend, Dack Fayden, Helping Hand, does exactly that.

Introduced in Multiverse Reforged, he was designed as a riff on the Polymorph theme, but once loose… well, he makes a heck of a Blink commander. I’ll be looking to make an Upgraded (3) list here, but I’ll also make an argument for this commander in Optimized (4) tiers of play.

Let’s look and see what kind of help that Dack is offering!

What Does Dack Fayden, Helping Hand Do?

Dack Fayden, Helping Hand is a 6 mana 4/6 with an enters ability and no other abilities or keywords, thankfully, since that enters effect is a paragraph by itself.

It essentially reads: put a random creature from your deck onto the battlefield for each opponent you have, then give one to each opponent, goaded. The most straightforward way to play Dack here is as a political piece who hands out beaters to your opponents that they have to attack each other with. You’ll even get any enters effects off of the creatures revealed.

However, there is a funny trick to Dack, which is that if you blink the creature before giving it away with a Cloudshift or slide it later with Long Road Home, you get the creature. So, blink it is.

Key Cards for Dack Fayden, Helping Hand

There are three categories of blink being used in this deck. There are noncreature spells that blink creatures, noncreature spells that only blink creatures you control, and creatures that blink other permanents. Each of these serves slightly different purposes and need to be evaluated accordingly.

First up: the expected spells — the ones that blink creatures you control. Cloudshift variants and Teleportation Circle. This deck wants to trigger Dack multiple times per game, and these cards make it happen.

The permanents, like the aforementioned circle and recent pick-ups Airbender Ascension and Quantum Entanglement, can cause Dack to cheat out a lot of creatures for "our opponents". Ephemerate and Cloudshift are most likely to be used as a cheap, fast way to re-trigger Dack when needed, but can occasionally be used to keep one of our cheated creatures.

Airbender Ascension is a perfect transition to spells that can blink any creature. When that enchantment enters, it can airbend any creature, which means to exile that creature and allow its owner to cast that spell for 2 generic mana.

If Dack gives someone an Akroma, Angel of Wrath, you can airbend Akroma and then cast her for yourself. Regular blinking of creatures works the same. Phelia, Exuberant Shepherd, her older, more expensive friend, Galepowder Mage, and a lot of 2-mana instants can pull this off, one creature at a time.

Finally, there are the creatures that blink other creatures! Flickerwisp and Ennis, Debate Moderator are the oldest and newest iterations, respectively, with an 18-year gap between them.

This version of the deck only runs five such creatures, because too many makes the deck into a bit of a combo machine. When they enter, they can either flicker one of the other creatures so we get to keep it or they can flicker Dack himself to spin the wheel all over again.

In this vein of “Dack doublers,” we have Panharmonicon and Preston, the Vanisher — Panharmonicon doubles enters effects, while Preston makes token copies of creatures that entered without being cast, whether that’s by Dack’s ability or a flicker effect.

How Does the Deck Win?

This is not a subtle deck. It’s designed to cheat out big creatures as quickly as possible, allow them to be used by opponents against each other for a bit, and then steal them back to finish the job.

For the big creatures themselves, this list can be pretty flexible! You could pick a list of creatures at 7+ mana and have a good time without really optimizing or breaking the bank.

For me, I picked some pure beaters and some big donks that have solid enters effects. Akroma, Angel of Wrath is always fun and flashy, and while she and Luminate Primordial are older cards, they make an impact! Newer “versions” of these cards, like Zetalpa, Primal Dawn and Curious Colossus can join in the fun, too.

The early game is about trying to put down a ramp piece and powering out the commander.

The deck runs disruption primarily for this part of the game — make sure your opponents don’t win before you get going. Spin the wheel and dish out creatures. The deck runs a few general value creatures like Solemn Simulacrum and Beza, the Bounding Spring, which aren’t game-enders but do help us chug along if Dack finds them.

Use flicker spells to retrigger Dack or steal back our creatures. They’re goaded in the meantime, so they won’t be attacking you, but some of them are at their best under our control, like Ob Nixilis, the Ascended.

The deck has a total of four ways to get all the creatures back at once, so any one of them should pop up over the course of a game.

Homeward Path is the most obvious one and the easiest to activate. The second chapter of The Fall of Lord Konda is a good way to retrieve all the creatures, and the Saga turns into a creature we can flicker to re-trigger the chapter if we need to.

Lastly are a pair of sorceries — Morningtide's Light and Avatar's Wrath. The Light is the “better” one for our purposes, since we won’t have to pay to re-cast our creatures, but Wrath makes our opponents pay as well and has its own benefits.

And that’s what Dack has to offer, in this hand…

Dack Fayden, Helping Hand Commander Deck List

But On the Other Hand…

You see, there’s something up Dack’s sleeve. A little trick I alluded to earlier, when mentioning this deck doesn’t run many Flickerwisp cards. There’s a way to take this goofy inverted thief’s “Group Hug” deck and turn it into a pachinko machine from hell strangely reminiscent of a Gyruda, Doom of Depths Clones deck.

It relies on this one little mechanic from Battle for Baldur’s Gate: the Initiative. White Plume Adventurer and Seasoned Dungeoneer take the Initiative whenever they enter the battlefield, meaning they enter the Undercity and then progress through its various rooms, one of which says “Target player loses 5 life.”

With cards like Felidar Guardian, we can keep blinking Dack to rapidly chain through our deck until we get a whole host of blink creatures out alongside the initiative takers.

One of the aforementioned blink doublers makes this a foregone conclusion, but Abdel Adrian, Gorion's Ward is exceptional insurance. He can temporarily exile most of our board aside from a Fiend Hunter, which can then exile him, bringing everything else back.

Oops, there was a Felidar Guardian in the pile, and while the other enters effects were popping off, it decided to exile Fiend Hunter, bringing back Abdel to do it all again.

This version of the deck wants a lot of Game Changers and solid, cheap disruption to keep its game plan on lock. It’s far from Bracket 5, but it’ll do its thing well.

Conclusion

Now here’s a commander who knows how to party!

Some early hype has shouted out Dack as a potential cEDH-viable, and I wouldn’t go that far, but he does seem ready to slide up and down the brackets. Whether you’re interested in actually doing the Group Hug mode, the cheaty blink plan, or the pachinko machine, he’s got a lot of different ways to play.

Early reviews show him getting overshadowed by the other cool commanders released in the precon, but I can see him gaining steam for being such a weird mono-white commander in his own right.

What do you think? Will he be too one-note and gain a reputation, or will he be seen as a deck ready to shake things up?