Arnaud Gompertz tackles blink with a colorless Commander deck

A new series built to break the archetype

Arnaud Gompertz opens his new Inside Out run with a brewer’s dare: take a known Commander archetype, find its least-played color combination, and make it work without losing the soul of the deck. He says the whole idea is to “take an archetype, find the least played color combination for it, and try brewing a deck that respects the spirit as much as possible.”

That framing matters, because this is not just a gimmick pile. Gompertz says he reached out to Philomène Gatien, whose Do Your Worst concept ended three years earlier, and she agreed to let him carry it forward with a few guardrails: no three-color-or-more decks, no revisiting commanders or color combinations she already covered, and parallel nods to her earlier work when they fit. The result is a series that feels less like novelty content and more like a hard mode deckbuilding clinic.

Why blink was the perfect first test

Blink is one of Commander’s cleanest value engines, which is exactly why it is such a brutal place to start if you are trying to strip color away. The archetype is ranked No. 25 among EDHREC tags, and the spread is lopsided in the most revealing way possible: Azorius blink sits at about 8.4K decks, mono-white at 3.9K, and Orzhov at 2.2K. At the bottom of the pile are mono-black at 59 decks, colorless at 56, and Golgari at 28.

That gap is the whole story. Brago, King Eternal leads Azorius blink at 1.8K decks, while the main mono-white names are Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines at 803, Preston, the Vanisher at 664, and Phelia, Exuberant Shepherd at 621. Orzhov’s headliners are Ketramose, the New Dawn at 524, Syr Vondam, Sunstar Exemplar at 304, and Abigale, Eloquent First-Year at 239. By contrast, colorless blink barely exists, which makes it the right kind of impossible for a series built around stress-testing archetype identity.

How to fake blink when you have no colors

Blink is simple in theory and obnoxious in practice: exile a permanent, then bring it back right away. Flicker is the cousin version, where the card comes back later, usually at the beginning of the next end step. That timing difference is everything, because it changes whether you are using the effect as protection, as a value reset, or as a way to double-dip enters-the-battlefield triggers.

Colorless has to fake that entire loop with a much thinner toolbox. You are leaning on artifacts and other colorless permanents that can create temporary exile, delayed return, or repeatable resets, then pairing them with permanents whose best text is printed in the first line of the card, not the last. If a card only matters once it has attacked three times, it is not doing the job; if it draws a card, makes a token, finds another piece, or stabilizes the board the moment it enters, it belongs in the conversation.

The practical brew rule is easy to state and hard to stick to:

• Favor permanents with strong enters-the-battlefield triggers over static bodies.
• Prefer repeatable exile-and-return effects over single-use tricks, because the deck needs to keep manufacturing value all game.
• Treat delayed return like a safety valve, not just an engine, since the exile window can blank removal and buy time in multiplayer.
• Build around colorless cards that stay useful even when you never assemble a full combo, because the deck will not have the same density of payoff cards that Azorius gets for free.

That last point is where the build stops pretending to be blue-white. In a colorless shell, blink is less about chaining perfect loops and more about stretching the few reliable interactions you do have into something that feels unfair.

The rules backbone that makes the shell legal

Commander gives colorless blink a lane that other formats would not. A Commander deck is 99 cards plus 1 commander card, color identity is determined by the mana symbols in a card’s casting cost and rules text, and colorless cards are legal in any Commander deck. The format is typically a four-player free-for-all, with games usually sitting in the 3-5 player range, and commanders can be recast from the command zone for an additional two mana each time.

That structure matters more here than it does in a straightforward blink deck. Multiplayer gives your slow colorless engine time to assemble a board, and the command zone tax lets you turn a commander into a repeatable piece of the machine if it is one of the few cards that naturally carries the deck. The rules also matter for the exile-and-return timing itself, because Magic’s official rules reference, the Comprehensive Rules, is the definitive source when you are parsing exactly when a permanent leaves, returns, and triggers again.

The Edge of Eternities rules updates make the flicker-style pattern especially clear. When a spell is cast for warp, the permanent is exiled at the beginning of the next end step, then its owner can cast it again from exile on a future turn. That is not blink in the clean old sense, but it shows the same design logic: temporary exile can act like a reset button, a protection spell, or a second copy of an enters-the-battlefield trigger if you time it right.

The ceiling is lower than Azorius, and that is the point

Colorless blink is not trying to out-muscle Brago, King Eternal or replace the real blink houses of Commander. Its ceiling is lower, its setup is clunkier, and it has to work harder for every meaningful trigger. What it does have is novelty, resilience, and the kind of table surprise that gets people leaning over to read your board twice.

That is the real payoff of Gompertz’s challenge. He starts with the most obvious question, how little color can blink survive on, and ends in a place that proves the archetype is sturdier than it looks. Colorless does not give blink its best version, but it does expose the bones of the strategy, and once you see those bones, the rest of the deckbuilding puzzle gets a lot more interesting.