Welcome to the start of a brand-new blog series where we take a deep dive into Magic: The Gathering’s oldest, clunkiest sets - the ones whose power levels make you feel like you’ve just stepped back into the Stone Age. Each episode, we’ll give a quick run-through of some of the legendary creatures the set offers to let you know what to expect - and then we’ll ignore most of them in favour of hyper-focusing on a single, awful commander in a way that will almost certainly make our playgroup question our life choices. Our first subject?

Homelands - The worst set in Magic's history?

Ancient, bad sets and weird cards are one thing (well, two things), but Homelands (HML) was bad in 1995. That’s like being the worst smelling contestant in a barnyard animals based reality show. The set had such a low power level, by mid-nineties standards that Wizards had to add a rule to standard (type 2 as it was back then) that you must play at least five cards from every legal set. And for anybody reading this who remembers that, I'm just going to mention the Duelists' Convocation International. How many of you still have your number?

Magic: The Gathering in 1995

Since the release of Alpha (LEA) in August 1993, Magic had been charting a course through unknown waters. The first CCG, everything from deck construction rules to the inclusion of dedicated resource cards in lands, it all needed building from scratch. To give you an idea of just how early this is, Paul Sligh's eponymous Sligh deck, where the concept of the mana curve was introduced came 6 months after this set was released. I mention this to show that it was a time of rapid experimentation and evolution. The most egregious power outliers of the power nine, true duals, Sol Ring and various other high-power cards had been smoothed out of the core set earlier that year with the change from Revised (3ED) to Fourth Edition (4ED). Nobody really knew what they were doing. Ante was still a thing. Kyle Namvar and Scott Hungerford were about to be bitten by their experimentation hard.

Homelands - The Eternal Silver Medal

The more I look at Homelands, the more I find that it was the second to do things. Homelands is the second set explicitly tied to a non-Dominaria plane (The first being Arabian Nights, set in Rabiah). Homelands is the second set of the first block (although it was the first set to be removed from a block when Coldsnap (CSP) released in 2006 and was slotted into Ice Age block in place of our subject today). Homelands is the second top-down set (The first being Arabian Nights). Homelands is the second set to use the Legendary typing (The first being Legends). After digging further, I can confidently say that Homelands contains the first commander with a different colour identity to her colour.

Let's touch back on Homelands, Coldsnap and the Ice Age block in general. Sources are scarce these days, but it's a right mess. Fallen Empires (FEM)/Ice Age (ICE)/Alliances (ALL) makes thematic sense as a block, with the story having a natural flow, from the empires of Sarpadia falling (FEM), then the chaos of Lim-Dûl unleashing his undead hordes (ICE), and through to an alliance between races being formed to defeat the necromancer after Freyalise's World spell ends the ice age (ALL). Homelands being the original middle child of ICE/HML/ALL makes no sense, since it has nothing whatsoever to do with Dominaria, an ice age or an alliance.

Honestly, even though swapping HML for CSP is one of the ugliest fixes I've ever seen, it's still somehow less bad than the unholy mess above.

So What Did Homelands Do Right?

While the flavour of Arabian Nights is stronger (just appreciate the flavour of Camel), Homelands is the first time we went to a plane that was created specifically for a Magic Set (Dominaria kinda fell into existence due to early installment weirdness). Instead of having the stories of Shahrazad and those 1001 Arabian Nights to use, Ulgrotha is 100% MTG from birth. The story is based around planeswalkers and their interaction with the planes they walk to. We see developments of cards that were already becoming iconic - this is where Sengir Vampire got its backstory, with Baron, Grandmother and Castle Sengir all showing up. From a flavour perspective, Homelands tripped and fell so that future top-down planes like Innistrad could fly.

And What Did Homelands Do Less Right?

The flavour of the set was prioritised too heavily over the mechanics. Creating a mechanic to beautifully match the character of a specific character at the expense of playability is a design dead-end. Even with a functional errata from Falcon to Bird, Soraya the Falconer is still far too narrow.

The experimental three-coloured lands, in shard colours, were pitifully weak. The aforementioned Castle Sengir being the Grixis part of the cycle. I find this excusable as WotC have a tendency to overcorrect power levels following busted cards being released (and there should never be better lands than the original duals).

In short, while the flavour was on point, the abilities on the cards were weak, used too many words, and didn't vibe with the developing colour theory upon which Magic's balance so heavily rests.

With all that being said, shall we look at some cards?

Legends From a World Before Commander

Baron Sengir

Seven mana. No haste. Mono Black. At least he gets bigger when things die. just imagine - instead of Elias il-kor, Sadistic Pilgrim, you could run the vampire daddy before vampire daddies for more than three times the mana cost that gets the elusive +2/+2 counter whenever another creature dies. Wait, no, that creature has to have been damaged by Old Sengi himself this turn. I wonder why nobody wanted to play Homelands.

Autumn Willow

Shroud, except you can pay a green mana to let her be targeted, and so can your opponents. Which means if you try to Voltron her up, anyone can pay a green and open the removal floodgates. I wish I was making that up. It's okay though, at least she's got the same cost as a Colossal Dreadmaw, and the stats to lose to it!

Eron The Relentless

For the low, low price of 5 mana, you get the time-honoured combination of haste, regeneration and the sticking power of an omelette on a non-stick pan. His expense and regeneration ability almost make me want to hold him back. 5 damage is almost perfectly wrong for removing an opponent through commander damage, and having a regenerating 5/2 blocker will give many a threatening attacker pause.

Ihsan's Shade

Positively value for mana. A 6-cost in mono-black for a 5/5 with upside (that counts as evasion if you're lucky)? Your swords have no power here, planeswalker!

Chandler.

The candlemaker with a personal vendetta against artifact creatures. That’s it. No flexibility, no reach. Just a bizarrely specific hatred for the solemn simulacrum that your opponents want to see hit the graveyard anyway.

Chandler?

Why Does Chandler Hate Artifact Creatures?

Chandler's ability is odd. In the lore, he tricked Eron into giving him his Prized Ebony Rhino, which is an artifact creature. He didn't destroy it though - just sold it on. A con man traveling the plane of Ulgothra and specialising in, once again, stealing mechanical devices. His flavour text comes from Reveka, a sign of her anger at him for stealing some fancy keys that could muck about with clockwork creatures. Those of you who have been playing for too long might perk up at this and remember cards such as Brass Man - an artifact creature that needed "winding up" as you needed to pay during your upkeep if you wanted him to untap. Well, sadly the Brass man was printed in Arabian Nights and not in Homelands. Legal target for Chandler though, being one of the 41 cards that were legal targets for Chandler as of release.

With all that shade thrown, however, how can we make a 2025 deck that makes Chandler okay?

Deck Tech: Chandler, Mono-Red Control Menace (Bracket 2)

Step 1: Lower your expectations

Look. We're in one colour, so we've not got a huge card pool to work with. We're missing reliable tutors (hello, Gamble) and true card advantage (Faithless Looting is all well and good, but card selection is not card advantage). We're going to live in Bracket 2 for this deck. No game changers. Also a moderately high budget. We need all the help we can get here, okay?

Step 2: Accept that the core premise is bad

Chandler only hits artifact creatures. There are ways to mess with types though. Liquimetal Coating and Torque both apply surgical precision to help Mr. Candle delete a specific creature. Some weird cards from centuries past do the same thing - Toymaker, Thran Forge and the glory that is Transmogrifying Licid. Finally we've got Mycosynth lattice. No, we're not running That Karn. This is bracket 2, you monster. We're running Karn, Silver Golem instead - he lets us turn opponents' noncreature artifacts into creatures so that a certain tallow-based enlightener's destructive senses will perk up. About the best we can hope for is taking advantage for this is the classic Thornbite staff. The staff is balanced this time, though, since it costs us three whole red to activate Chandler's pop ability.

Step 3: Add Joven

In the lore, Joven and Chandler are partners in crime. In the game, they're both common legends - and would remain the only common legendary creatures until Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate dropped in 2022. You can't run one and not the other - and next time your LGS runs a pride event, you have a natural pairing!

Step 4: Okay, what now?

So we need to be a bit creative about how we go about getting our artifact-iantors. We've got Magda and Goblin Engineer. Magda indicates that we should lean heavily into treasure. Chandler being so overcosted makes this feel like a good idea anyway, so let's bring in Academy Manufactor and a load of random treasure enablers. Yes, I'm running Ragavan, Stop judging me - we need all the help we can get. Moonsilver key can be used to find Liquimetal Torque due to the Torque's mana ability and Hoarding Dragon rounds it off.

Step 5: Eat your vegetables.

Our draw suite is very mono-red. I hope you like discarding cards to get more cards. The interaction is also very mono-red. I hope you like crossing your fingers and hoping that the blown-up stuff isn't going to come back as itself or as something better, because you better believe that we're running the full suite of Chaos Warp, Wild Magic Surge and Zoyowa's Justice. The perennial red boardwipes are in too, of course.

Finally for step 5, we're playing mana rocks and treasure generators.

Step 6: So, how does this end?

Weapons manufacturing is Artifact Guttersnipe. You've got ways to blow things up aplenty, and you'll be sacrificing treasures like nobody's business to pay for all your big toys. if you have Karn out and 20 treasures, along with Weapons manufacturing, you can float the mana from sacrificed treasures then activate Karn's abilities to turn the munitions into 0/0 artifact creatures. They die and you deal 40 damage. All works at instant speed too, so you can remove problematic players for just a teensy little bit of setup.

Hellkite Tyrant is a splashy win-con that I couldn't not include. It's a one-turn clock with mycosynth lattice out.

Insurrection is insurrection. Amazing what happens when everybody else's creatures mutiny and board stalls clear up, the rain is gone, you can see clearly now.

Uh... There's also just Commander Damage from Chandler himself.

Step 7: The vandal in the room

Okay, so Vandalblast + Mycosynth lattice is a problem in bracket 2. It'll hit all of your opponent's lands while leaving your field untouched. Karn, Silver Golem + Mycosynth lattice is also a problem as he effectively reads "For one generic mana, destroy target land". This kind of game lock always leaves a sour taste in my mouth when it happens in low power tables, so just be careful if that's the line open to you. If this ends up happening, talk to the other players in the pod about the line and the inevitable twenty turns it'll take you to actually win from here.

Is this deck good? No.
Is it functional enough to win Bracket 2 games while making your friends deeply uncomfortable about the fact they lost to Chandler? Absolutely - just don't slow roll them.

Full Deck Link Here