5 Underrated Commander Cards from Homelands

Homelands makes everyone’s short-list of the worst Magic sets of all time, both in terms of design and the power level of the cards. After all, when it comes to 60-card formats and Commander, there are really only two cards in the set that have made significant contributions – Merchant Scroll, and Memory Lapse. So, if you aren’t playing Blue regularly, there’s a very real chance you’ve never touched a card from Homelands. 

However, the set has a few hidden gems that people tend to overlook since their eyes glaze over the minute people see the Orb of Ulgrotha set symbol on a card.  These are all cards you should seriously consider running in Commander, in spite of the fact that they are from one of the worst sets of all time.

Underrated Commander: Soraya the Falconer

Soraya is definitely a card in need of a reprint, because the original text on the card is super misleading if you don’t look up the oracle text. Luckily, Soraya actually offers her buff to all birds and not just falcons.

If you follow my content on YouTube or X, you may already know that I have an affinity for birds. So yes, I’m a little bit biased when it comes to this pick. However, I do legitimately think that Soraya the Falconer has the potential to be a good commander for a Bird deck.

Obviously, buffing all your birds is great, but don’t sleep on Soraya’s activated ability. Banding has a bad reputation because it’s an incredibly convoluted mechanic. Even the current oracle text for Banding is likely to give you a migraine.

But the gist of it is this – if you attack or block with a band, you get to determine how combat damage is dealt. In other words, the mechanic is all upside, and it’s likely to give your opponent a real headache any time you send a band into combat. So, Soraya’s ability to give birds banding is actually pretty awesome. It is very difficult to block or attack through a band.

The best way to build around Soraya is fairly obvious – jam a bunch of birds into your deck. However, I would say that you especially want to lean into birds that help you go wide, since it makes the buff that much more potent. Battle Screech, Emeria Angel, and Wingmate Roc are Soraya’s best friends.

Primal Order

Primal Order probably won’t make you a whole lot of friends, but it’s certainly powerful. There are nonbasic lands everywhere in Commander, and Primal Order is great against them. The color pie was kind of all over the place in Homelands, as this card feels more red than anything!

But in this case that’s a good thing, because Green doesn’t normally get the ability to do direct damage or punish players for using nonbasic lands. The effect is symmetrical, but if you’re playing a mono-Green commander and a minimal number of non-basics, you can break the symmetry. Even if you can’t, this effect does punish all of your opponents before it ever punishes you.

Feroz’s Ban

Here’s another card that your friends might not be thrilled to play against. The early days of Magic were absolutely filled with tons of symmetrical hate cards, and Primal Order and Feroz’s Ban are good examples of this strange design philosophy.

6 mana is a lot, but making all players’ creature spells cost 2 more is no small thing. If nothing else, it’s like adding an additional Commander tax for everyone. 

To most take advantage of the Ban, you need to have a creature-light deck. And there are some Commanders who really pay you off for going that route, like Narset, Enlightened Master. And she can even allow you to cast it for free with her attack trigger!

Renewal

Okay, so it’s not quite Kodama’s Reach or Harrow, but Renewal is pretty good in decks that are extra interested in lands.  You do have to sacrifice a land to search up a basic land, but it comes into play untapped and you get to draw a card on the next upkeep. 

This certainly isn’t the sort of thing all Green decks want, but if you’re playing a Commander who likes it when lands go to the graveyard – like The Gitrog Monster or Titania –  you should consider trying out Renewal. Turning that sacrifice land into an additional card or a 5/3 token is some pretty serious business.

Forget

In last week’s article, I was really surprised that Bazaar Trademage didn’t see more play. Forget definitely isn’t as good as the Trademage, but it only sees play in 172 of 1,936,995 blue decks on EDHRec! The number should definitely be higher than that.

Like the Trademage, Forget lets you discard and draw cards, which is powerful when you have a Commander who is interested in the graveyard, discarding cards, or drawing cards.

For example, Rielle and Oskar both have abilities that like having cards in the graveyard. They also like when you discard cards, effectively giving you back any cards you happen to discard.

Forget has some additional utility too. You can target any player with it. So, if you know an opponent has a particularly problematic card in their hand, you can use this to get rid of it. They do get to draw, so this is mostly only useful in an emergency, but those situations do come up. Alternatively, if you’re playing a particularly political game of Commander, you can use Forget to help one of your allies dig deeper in their deck.

End Step

Homelands might stink, but these cards don’t! In fact, I would say that there are some situations where you should be playing these cards!  What do you think, are there any other underrated Commander cards in Homelands? Let me know over on X.