Pako, Arcane Retriever
Legendary Creature — Elemental Dog
Partner with Haldan, Avid Arcanist
Haste
Whenever Pako attacks, exile the top card of each player's library and put a fetch counter on each of them. Put a +1/+1 counter on Pako for each noncreature card exiled this way.
- CMC
- 5
- Mana cost
- Color identity
- GR
- Rarity
- mythic
- Set
- Commander 2020
- Price
- $1.01
- EDHREC rank
- #17632
Pako, Arcane Retriever hits the battlefield as a free spell-stealing engine — every combat, it exiles cards from opponents' libraries and lets you cast them later, snowballing card advantage faster than most five-drops have any right to. The catch is the five-mana price tag and reliance on combat, which means anything that grants additional attack steps, like Aggravated Assault, turns a strong card into a genuinely oppressive one.
Format Analysis
Where it lives, where it can’t
| Format | Verdict |
|---|---|
| commander | legal |
| legacy | legal |
| modern | not legal |
| pioneer | not legal |
| standard | not legal |
| vintage | legal |
| pauper | not legal |
| oathbreaker | legal |
Pako, Arcane Retriever is built for Commander and almost exclusively lives there — a 75-card singleton format with multiple opponents means Pako is exiling three cards per attack step instead of one, which compounds its advantage absurdly fast. In Legacy and Vintage it's technically legal but doesn't compete: five mana for a creature that needs to attack before it does anything is too slow against those formats' turn-one and turn-two clocks. Oathbreaker could support it as a companion piece to the right planeswalker, but the format's compressed game length limits how many triggers you'll realistically accumulate.
Key Combos
Combo lines featuring this card
Aggravated AssaultBear UmbraPako, Arcane Retriever
Infinite combat phases; Infinitely large creature
View on Commander Spellbook ↗Price Context
Current price
$1.01 cheap tier
At $1.01, Pako, Arcane Retriever sits in the bulk-rare tier despite delivering genuine game-warping value, which makes it one of the better pickups per dollar in Temur or Gruul creature-based strategies. That price is unlikely to climb unless a high-profile list or reprint draws fresh attention, but at this floor it's a low-risk inclusion regardless.
Explore
Sources
Mentioned
Updated . Data from Scryfall, EDHREC, and Commander Spellbook.