How to build Homer, the Hermit

Homer reads like a crab tribal card and builds like a land deck. The crabs set the number, and the lands are what multiply it.

Homer alone mills two cards per land

Read the ability as a multiplication rather than a count. Twice one Crab is two, and two cards off a land drop is not a plan, it is a rounding error in a ninety nine card library. Twice four is eight, and eight is the number where the table starts paying attention. That gap is the whole build, and the thing to notice is which half of the multiplication is cheap. Another body of the right type adds exactly two and usually does nothing else, because the pool is fifty nine legal cards in these colours and most of them are draft filler. Another land drop multiplies whatever X already is, and the cards that buy land drops are good cards anyway. Azusa, Lost but Seeking and Exploration and Burgeoning and Oracle of Mul Daya would all be playable in a deck that had never heard of a crab.

So the creature count stops at the point where the next crab would be a blank. Twelve of the thirty creatures are one of the five types, seven of them Crabs, four Starfish and one Trilobite, and three more cards mint them: Hard Evidence makes a Crab token, Scuttletide makes one every turn you can spare and a spare card, and Simic Keyrune turns itself into a Crab for on the turn you need the count. Everything else in the deck is there to make lands enter.

A fetch land in this deck is two triggers

Evolving Wilds enters the battlefield, which is a trigger. You crack it, a basic enters the battlefield, and that is a second trigger. In a normal deck that land is a colour fixer that costs you a turn of tempo. Here it is worth double any land that simply enters, and there are twelve of them: Evolving Wilds, Terramorphic Expanse, Escape Tunnel, Vibrant Cityscape, Promising Vein, Shire Terrace, Warped Landscape, Terminal Moraine, Myriad Landscape, Blighted Woodland, Fabled Passage and Thawing Glaciers. Blighted Woodland and Myriad Landscape each fetch two basics, so those are three triggers from one card.

Thawing Glaciers is the one to read twice. It returns itself to your hand at the end of every turn, so it is a land drop and a basic land every single turn for as long as it lives, and it never needs a graveyard or a second card to do it. It enters tapped and it taps for nothing, which in any other deck is a reason to cut it. In this one it is the most reliable card in the mana base.

Seven spells that trade one land for two

The same arithmetic holds in the spell slots. Harrow sacrifices a land and puts two basics onto the battlefield untapped, so it is land neutral, two triggers, and it can be done on an opponent's end step. Roiling Regrowth and Cycle of Renewal are the same spell for the same mana, and the only difference from the card above is that their basics arrive tapped. Running all three is not redundancy here, it is three copies of the effect the deck most wants to draw. Entish Restoration gets three basics instead of two whenever you control something with power four or better, which Mirelurk Queen and Ancient Greenwarden both satisfy, though not the 0/17 you might reach for first. Springbloom Druid puts the effect on a creature. Crop Rotation turns one land into any land in the deck at instant speed, which is usually Thawing Glaciers.

Dreamscape Artist is the one that keeps going. Three mana, a tap, a discard and a land, and two basics arrive untapped. Every turn. A creature for that reliably produces two landfall triggers a turn is the best rate in the list, and it costs fourteen cents.

All seven want basic lands left in the library, which is the real reason nineteen of the thirty nine lands are basics in a three colour deck. Cut them for duals and the package that makes the deck work stops having anything to find.

The lands in your graveyard are the kill

Notice what the land sacrificing does on the other side of the board. Every fetch land you crack and every Harrow you cast leaves a land card in your graveyard, and after six or seven turns that is a pile. Splendid Reclamation returns all of them to the battlefield at once, and each one is a separate landfall trigger. With four bodies out and six lands in the yard that is forty eight cards off one sorcery, at every opponent at the same time.

Aftermath Analyst does the same thing for and a sacrifice, and it mills three of your own cards on the way in, which is a small favour rather than a cost. Lumra, Bellow of the Woods mills four, returns the pile, and leaves a creature the size of your mana base. Ramunap Excavator and Undergrowth Recon do it slowly and repeatedly instead of all at once. The deck does not need every one of these to draw, it needs one, and it holds five.

Ancient Greenwarden is worth more than four crabs

Ancient Greenwarden makes a landfall trigger happen an additional time. Four more crabs would take X from eight to sixteen. Greenwarden takes one trigger and makes it two, which does the same thing for one card instead of four, and it works on Hedron Crab and Ruin Crab and Tatyova, Benthic Druid and Lotus Cobra at the same time. It also lets you replay lands out of the graveyard, which is the fetch land package running a second time.

Bruvac the Grandiloquent doubles what an opponent mills and The Water Crystal adds four to it. Both are replacement effects, and there is a wrinkle worth knowing before you count on having both: when two of them apply to the same mill, the player being milled chooses the order. They will double first and add second, because that is the smaller number. An X of eight becomes twenty rather than twenty four. Still excellent, just not the figure the two card faces suggest.

Stack the real ones and the game ends quickly. Four bodies, Greenwarden and Bruvac is thirty two cards per opponent per land. A library is ninety two cards once the opening hand is drawn. Three land drops.

Eighteen of the thirty creatures add nothing to X

That number is deliberate and it is worth defending, because a typal deck that is only forty percent typal looks like a mistake. The eighteen are Azusa and Oracle of Mul Daya and Dryad of the Ilysian Grove and Sakura-Tribe Scout putting extra lands onto the battlefield, Tatyova and Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait and Tireless Tracker turning land drops into cards, Lotus Cobra and Tireless Provisioner turning them into mana, and the recursion package putting the sacrificed ones back. Every one of those makes X get multiplied more often. A thirteenth body of the right type would make X bigger once.

There is a second reason. A deck that needed twenty bodies of these five types would be playing Fortress Crab and Armored Cancrix and Jwari Scuttler, which are vanilla creatures with no text on them, and it would fold to one sweeper with nothing left to rebuild from. Twelve bodies plus Scuttletide as a token faucet plus Purple Pentapus, which buys itself back out of the graveyard for , reaches the same X and survives losing the board.

No power at all, and two cards that reward it

Look down the tribe and the left hand number is almost always zero. Homer is 0/9, Charix, the Raging Isle is 0/17, and Ruin Crab and both cheap Starfish are 0/3. Combat is not on the table, and two cards turn that from a drawback into the point.

Phenax, God of Deception gives everything you control a tap ability that mills equal to its toughness. Homer taps for nine. Charix taps for seventeen. That is twenty six cards a turn from two creatures with no land drop involved, which matters on the turns you have nothing to play and on everybody else's turn as well. Charix is an unplayable 0/17 in most decks and a repeatable seventeen card mill spell in this one.

Toxic Deluge is the other one. Set X to three and most boards in a pod die, while Homer, Charix, Ancient Greenwarden, Phenax, Uchuulon and Mirelurk Queen all walk away from it. A symmetrical sweeper is nearly one sided when your creatures are built out of toughness and you were never going to attack with them.

Twelve of the lands make no coloured mana

This is the bill for everything above and it should be said plainly. Six of the thirty nine lands produce no mana at all and six more produce only colourless, which leaves twenty seven actually making colour. Sixteen blue sources, sixteen green and fifteen black, for a commander who wants one of each on turn three and a handful of cards that want two of something. A single black pip by turn two lands at about seventy five percent rather than the ninety you would design for.

I am taking that trade instead of fixing it, and the honest version of why is that the raw count understates the deck. Twelve of those lands fetch whichever basic is missing, so they are slow sources rather than dead ones, and the seven land sacrificing spells do the same job. What you genuinely give up is speed, because a lot of this arrives tapped. If you would rather not, the cards to change are Escape Tunnel and Vibrant Cityscape, the two most redundant fetch lands in the list and two of the ones that make no mana on their own.

Altar of Dementia asks for power this deck does not have

Four cards that belong here on a skim and do not survive the second read.

Altar of Dementia mills equal to the sacrificed creature's power, and the power column in this deck is zeroes. Sacrificing Charix to it mills nothing at all. Field of the Dead wants seven lands with different names, and this one runs nineteen basics across three names. Iceberg Cancrix is a real Crab that mills two whenever a snow permanent enters, which sounds free until you price the all snow mana base it needs and notice that two cards at one opponent is not much beside a commander doing twenty four across the table. The Crab Queen makes random Crab token copies and is the one that is outright disqualifying, because it is digital only and Commander does not allow it in a paper deck at all.

Three libraries in the graveyard is a cost, and one land pays it

Milling a table does not kill anybody directly. A player with an empty library is fine until their next draw step, so the kill always lands on somebody else's turn, and a sweeper or a Thassa's Oracle can happen before it does. It also fills three graveyards, and some of what goes in there is worth more to its owner in the yard than on top of the library. Against a reanimator deck you are doing half the work for them.

Bojuka Bog is in the list for exactly that, a land that exiles a graveyard as it enters and is therefore also a landfall trigger. One answer is not enough if your pod has two graveyard decks in it, and the fix then is more of that effect rather than less milling. This deck has no second way to win to fall back on, and that is a real thing to know before building it.

The core list

Hover any card name to see the card. This is the bracket 3 build, and Crop Rotation is the only Game Changer in it.

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Two rungs, and only one changes how the deck wins

Both ladders push the same lever the core list does, which is the number of times a land enters rather than the number of crabs on the board. Neither of them adds a body.

The cheap rung keeps the whole engine and sells every multiplier. Bruvac the Grandiloquent, Ancient Greenwarden, Exploration, Burgeoning, Azusa and Phenax, God of Deception are most of the money in the list and all of them make an existing trigger count for more. What replaces them still makes lands enter, just more slowly: Llanowar Scout, Explore, Urban Evolution, Perennial Behemoth, and the three bounce lands, which are better here than their price suggests because returning a land to your hand is another land drop waiting to happen. It plays like the same deck a turn or two later, and it kills a table two turns after that. The three shocks and the triome go too, so the mana gets worse before the gameplay does.

The bracket 4 rung does not raise X either. Crucible of Worlds replays a cracked fetch land every single turn, which turns the twelve of them into a permanent two triggers a turn. Cultivator Colossus empties a hand of lands onto the battlefield in one cast. Scapeshift sacrifices the whole board and rebuilds it, which is the largest single landfall trigger in the colours. Prismatic Vista, Misty Rainforest and Verdant Catacombs do what Evolving Wilds does without the tempo loss. The tutors and Cyclonic Rift are what actually move it past bracket 3, and they are there so the engine pieces show up on time rather than to add anything new.

FAQ

How many crabs does Homer need to deck an opponent?

Four bodies of the five types, counting Homer himself, sets X at eight, so one land drop mills eight cards from every opponent you point it at. A Commander library is ninety two cards after the opening hand, so that is twelve land drops. Add Ancient Greenwarden and it is six, add Bruvac the Grandiloquent on top and it is three. Splendid Reclamation returning six lands at once gets there in a single turn.

Do Crab tokens count toward Homer's ability?

Yes. The ability counts Crabs, Lobsters, Nautiluses, Starfish and Trilobites you control and does not care whether they are tokens. That is why Hard Evidence and Scuttletide are in the list, and Scuttletide can make one every turn for a mana and a spare card. Simic Keyrune counts too on any turn you pay to turn it into a Crab before your land drop.

Does a mill deck belong at a bracket 3 table?

The core list here is a bracket 3 build and Crop Rotation is the only Game Changer in it. The thing to say out loud before you shuffle is that the deck wins by emptying libraries and has no second plan, because that changes how a pod plays against it. It is slow, it does not attack, and it fills three graveyards on the way, which is a real gift to a reanimator deck.

Does Homer mill every opponent or only one?

Any number of target players, chosen when the trigger goes on the stack, so at a table of three you normally name all three and each of them mills X separately. That is what separates Homer from Hedron Crab, which only ever mills one player. It also means a player with an effect that stops them being targeted is skipped rather than blanking the whole trigger.

Can I target myself with Homer's mill?

You can, because the ability says players rather than opponents, and there are times you want to. Putting your own lands in the graveyard is what Splendid Reclamation, Aftermath Analyst and Lumra, Bellow of the Woods are waiting for. Be careful late, since you lose the game the next time you would draw from an empty library.

What is the cheapest way to build this deck?

The budget rung on this page swaps nineteen cards and no Game Changers, and it costs a fraction of the core list. It loses the doublers rather than the engine, so it does the same thing a couple of turns later. The cards worth saving for first are Ancient Greenwarden and Bruvac the Grandiloquent, because each of them roughly doubles the output of everything already in play.

Is Homer, the Hermit legal in Commander yet?

Not yet. Mystery Booster Commander Edition arrives on 9 November 2026 and Homer is legal from that day. Card databases read him as not legal right now, which means not legal yet rather than banned. Every other card in all three lists on this page is already legal today.