So... the 'worst set in Magic: The Gathering!" Back in the day, I did not realize just how poorly Homelands was regarded by the community, but while some other blocks like Fallen Empires or The Dark have not been regarded well due to its low power level, the more I realize that the worst-regarded set in Magic: the Gathering is its seventh expansion, Homelands.
Homelands was developed by a different team, and did not really go through a quality and balance control. The set was 'rushed out' regardless due to internal promises being made towards the set designers -- despite Magic's primary team warning against it -- and was predictably lambasted by the fandom due to its disconnect ot its adjacent expansions as well as the abysmally low power levels. Years later, Wizards of the Coast even released a 'replacement' set as the second expansion of the Ice Age block, 'Coldsnap'.
Homelands was designed as a 'top-down' expansion, where the flavour of the setting is designed first before the mechanics and balance. I love top-down expansions, and that's why I have a huge soft spot for Fallen Empires and the original Kamigawa set. But Homelands... failed on a lot of metrics, and unlike Fallen Empires, did not have the excuse of logistics to fall back on. So... yeah. At the end of the day, I do have a little soft spot for Homelands, still. I don't like it as much as Fallen Empires among the older sets, but I do think it's a fascinating little expansion.
Homelands' story is also quite standalone and divorced from everything going onin the main plane of Dominaria. To Homelands' credit, this is a very respectable way of the franchise actually showing these 'planeswalkers' moving to other dimensions since we've only seen Dominaria and some Phyrexian invaders previously. The setting is the plane of Ulgrotha, which is segmented from the rest of the universe with a powerful spell called Feroz's Ban. However, the powerful planeswalkers Feroz and Serra (of Serra's Angel fame) died and disappeared respectively, causing the plane to fall into chaos as the evil vampire lord Baron Sengir tries to take over the plane .
For all the hype of being a 'flavour-first' story, it feels quite similar to so many other early MTG sets. I don't want to bully the expansion even more since the fandom has already done it, but I felt like it was still worth pointing out regardless.
- Click here for the previous part, Ice Age
- Click here for the next part, Alliances.
- Click here for the index.
[Originally released as 'Homelands' in August 2019; rewritten in March 2025]
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One thing that Homelands has going for it? Finally, after multiple expansions of the flavour text talking about Urza and Mishra and Lim-Dul and whatnot, we actually see the main characters of the lore represented in card form, as a Legendary card to boot. Baron Sengir is a Vampire Noble, and he is the guy that the Sengir Vampires from Alpha are named after. Design-wise, Baron Sengir is all right. He's got a vaguely-East-Asian look to his outfit, albeit with a golden Batman symbol snuck in -- again, he definitely looks like a proper 'legend' compared to half of the legendaries in Legends.
In addition to the traditional flying ability that most vampires have, Baron Sengir gets more powerful if he kills an enemy personally. He also has the ability to regenerate other vampires. Which sounds good... until you realize that there are only two other vampires in existence at this point of MTG's history, and due to the 'Summon Legend' wording, none of the three Sengir family members are considered vampires at the time of release. That's why we needed the creature type retcons!
Irini Sengir is Baron Sengir's adopted daughter. Happily adopted, because she's also cruel and evil. She's also a dwarf, and she gets her type updated to 'Vampire Dwarf'. I'm not sure what she's doing in this art. Is she unleashing an evil magic spell, or is she absorbing magic? She seems surprised by it, whatever she's doing. Irini has the ability to make Green and White enchantments more expensive to cast, and those two would count as the most traditionally heroic colours.
Grandmother Sengir is Baron Sengir's crazy grandmother, which I suppose makes some nice thematic sense with the 'old noble family' vibes that many vampire fiction has. She's a very grisly-looking old woman, with terribly-wrinkled skin and an insane head of hair. Her ability isn't quite the 'delightfully wed power and madness' that the flavour text implies, mreely manifesting in -1/-1 counters.
While Homelands was turned into persona-non-grata by Wizards for decades, the relatively recent multiverse crossover where the Phyrexians attack all the planes have Grandmother Sengir represent Ulgrotha... like this. Riding a hcariot pulled by bats, using a whip to strangle cyborg alien invaders, cackling all the time. Good job, grandma!
Ihsan's Shade is a pretty cool character if you read his lore, a fallen paladin corrupted and turned into a shade by Baron Sengir. He's another one of the many flavourful legendary creatures, and that flavour text is cool! The card itself? A 6-mana 5/5 with a measly protection from white. That scales so poorly compared to cards like Black Knight from Alpha, let alone comparable cards from the last couple of expansions like Knight of Stromgald or Order of the Ebon Hand. I think getting a cool character with a terrible card is worse than not receiving a card at all.
Greater Werewolf is a pretty horrifying card art! The actual creature itself isn't quite as interesting as what werewolves would become in Innistrad, but look at that artwork. Very grotesque, and not what I expect from a regular werewolf transformation in our common pop culture. The wolf head sprouts from the side of the humans' face, with two separate mouths howling. Most uncomfortable is the fact that the human's eye is being integrated into the 'profile' of the wolf face. Now my question is that... is this poor wretched soul mid-transformation, or is this a type of monstrous werewolf who has a screaming half-transformed human face on the side of his head at all times?
Timmerian Fiends is classified as a Horror, and it's a weird removal that also interacts with the 'gambling' ante stuff... except Timmerian Fiends gives itself to the opponent. Weird! I guess they really don't like you. Not sure about the artwork. One of the guys is a skeleton in a robe with a bunch of growths around his forehead; the other guy is a wombat-person. I'm really not sure what's going on here.
Cemetery Gate is quite hilarious. It's this expansion's Wall creature for Black, and that vampire being kept at bay by the gate is extremely pissed off. He's not furious, he's not terrified, he's not raging or begging or showing any kind of huge emotion. He's just... there. With a 'are you effing kidding me' expression on his face. Like Fallen Empires, Homelands actually features alternate artwork for some cards, although only two variations of any given card exist in the expansion.
Black Carriage is another example of the design team attempting to simulate what would become the Vehicle card type much, much later. The Black Carriage itself can't untap on its own, and you need to 'sacrifice' a creature for the Black Carriage to be untapped and ready to move around. It's been errata'd from a 'carriage' (which implies the creature represents the whole unit) to 'Horse', so I guess the flavour of the mechanic is the horses just being lazy until they are 'fed' with a creature?
Feast of the Unicorn is a particularly morbid enchantment, isn't it? We don't see anything too graphic, but the bloodied leg of the once-holy beast and the grinning demons surrounding it do paint a pretty grisly picture. 90's-era fantasy tends to be a bit more mature and not quite as all-ages as the genre would later be, but MTG would notably shy away from a lot of these more... brutal card art.
I like the Sea Troll! I don't think MTG ever had 'proper' troll tribal mechanics, did they? And even then, I feel like most of the troll cards I've seen have been in Green or Black. Sea Troll is an aquatic creature, and therefore he's blue. He's got typical sea-monster fins and the 'Regeneration' keyword. Trolls sometimes are flavoured to have a 'healing factor' in the fantasy genre, which is fine... but the Sea Troll can only regenerate if it fights a Blue creature, making it way too specific to justify it being played. I would definitely give it points for being inventive, for sure!
The Majhan is a big fish! Or Serpent, rather. It looks like one of those deep-sea anglerfishes that traumatized a generation of children in 2003 with Finding Nemo, except its body clearly trails off into something longer than a portly anglerfish. And he's not menacing clownfishes, no. The Marjhan's mouth is huge enough to swallow what appears to be a sperm whale whole! Unfortunately, the Marjhan is everything about 'large Blue sea monsters' that are impractical in early MTG. It's got 'Islandhome', which means it can't even attack unless your opponent controls and Island, and it'll die if you don't have any Islands, and it can't untap unless you sacrifice a creature to it. And all that for a 8/8 with an ability to... deal 1 measly damage for 2 mana. That is not worth all of the insane drawbacks that this dude has!
I normally won't talk too much about 'animals as cards' now that we're eight expansions in, but Giant Albatross just tickles my fancy. There's just something hilarious about a non-threatening animal that's so large that it's looming over the ship below it! Not sure what the flavour is, but this giant bird dying can also cause other creatures that damaged it to die. Some costs are involved, but for a set that's been heavy on flavour over functionality, this one is just confusing to me.
I just really like that the Narwhal is a card. Not a 'Ulgorthan Sea Narwhal', or 'Giant Narwhal', or 'Narwhal Pod'. No, just a Narwhal. Which, to be fair, is a pretty fantastical creature itself. It's got First Strike and Protection from Red for some reason, and apparently those nasty Sea Trolls hunt the Narwhals!
Ey, Giant Oyster! Its got a fun, flavourful effect of tapping and staying tapped, but also trapping an enemy creature with it. And if you pump mana, they slowly get -1/-1 counters until they drown and die. It's a nice representation of them being trapped by an oyster as you drown to death or something. I like it.
A lot of these early creature types have been errata'd over the years, like alligator being subsumed into 'crocodile', or tiger being subsumed into 'cat', or narwhal becoming a 'whale'. But a lot of aquatic creatures retain their creature type even until modern day, even though there are only a single-digit number of representatives in the thousands of cards in the game. In Giant Oyster's case, a single representative. I love this kookiness, and in the time of how modern MTG has been going back and forth on whether to streamline or go wide with creature types, I really do enjoy some silliness like this. Despite its name, however, the Giant Oyster's artwork actually depicts a giant clam. Clams and oysters are, admittedly, in the same taxonomic class of bivalves, but so are you, dear human reader, and a raccoon.
I was originally going to put this at the bottom, but I felt like the interconnected art for the two Dark Maze variants are cool enough. There's not as many cards in these smaller expansions, which gives me a bit more breathing room! The Dark maze depicts a corridor made up of shadowy, foggy walls with screaming ghostly faces fading in and out. We get to see two hapless adventurers falling prey to the dark maze, with one still fighting and the other one having fallen. It definitely is quite flavourful, and the effect has the Dark Maze attack exactly once (Walls can't attack, remember) before being exiled from the game entirely, representing the shadows fading away. Cool!
I like Memory Lapse. Okay, part of why I like it is because the artwork reminds me of what would later become the logo for Wikipedia (which this card definitely predates), and it's a nice little way to show little pieces of puzzle falling off someone's memory. But the effect of the spell is literally a memory lapse. The opponent doesn't forget the spell entirely (like what sending it to the graveyard would represent), they just forget it for a brief moment. Like, a turn's worth of time. It's like when you enter a room and forget what you're going to do, and you walk out and then you remember you went back to get your keys.
We are into Green now, and we have a pretty cool Hungry Mist! It's a green, noxious mist that's taken a wraith-like form. I like that it doesn't actually have a 'proper' face, but it's actually made up of the wispy trails of the mist. Subsequent errata would turn 'mist' into 'Elemental', which makes sense! This is a kind of a wind elemental!
A nice running theme in Green in Homelands are some Faeries. In general I do think that the definitions between things like faeries, ouphes and dryads can be a bit blurry, but I think it's quite consistent that most faeries would be little 'Tinkerbell' style people with bug wings. Willow Faerie is a pretty simple concept, just a lady with butterfly wings, but the fact that she's sitting on top of a deer head is neat enough to illustrate the whole 'fey spirit attuned with nature' fantasy.
Faerie Noble looks pretty stern, and he has the 'Lord' effect of buffing other faeries on the field. Unfortunately, just buffing the toughness and needing an additional cost to give a temporary buff to power isn't the best effect! I do like the art in general, though, and the eyepatch gives this noble a bit of an oomph that makes these particular 'Willow' faeries a mite more badass.
If this was a larger expansion, I'd relegate these two cards at the end. But I don't actually have all that much to talk about the Green cards in Homelands, so Joven's Ferrets and Rysorian Badger get to hang out here and be shown off. I always appreciate it when a TCG (or even tabletop RPG sourcebooks) take the time to detail the smaller, more mundane creatures in real life. Joven's Ferrets are apparently even named after the pet of one of the people who worked on this set.
I like the badger card. It is a weak if potentially useful effect, where it removes cards from your opponent's graveyard if it manages to hit the enemy face. The idea is that the badger is scavenging and 'eating' those corpses, which I thought is quite flavourful. I like the art, too, where that skull actually has a second badger that has burrowed up right underneath it, and its little paws are showing up under the skull.
Amazingly, despite Joven's Ferret currently being the only Ferret in the game, the type still exists! We saw a lot of badgers in the recent 'animal people plane' expansion of Bloomburrow, as well as a bunch of other woodland animals, but not ferrets.
Carapace isn't the best enchantment effects-wise, but actually not a bad card. The toughness boost isn't the best (even if it makes sense for an armour) but the cheap cost and the sacrifice effect for regeneration is pretty neat. Both art variants are very nice, and Anson Maddocks seem to have H.R. Giger's work on his mind while designing this. The first one, featuring the woman, has the strange, chitin-skeleton carapace around her torso and abdomen like a strange dress, and part of it wraps around her neck like a funky neck piece. There seems to be a 'head' with a bug face pointing upwards, which, yes, does also look like a ball-sack a bit.
The alternate art shows a different Carapace armour, this one wrapping around the wielder's head like a helmet and giving him a very cool -- if creepy -- bug-like helmet. There is a very Facehugger-esque design on his back, a spidery, pelvis-bone-like mass with something that also looks similar to the 'head' on the lady's Carapace's sternum part. It's a lot more consistent than the scavenged Armor Thrull we saw a couple of expansions ago, and I wonder if these Carapace creatures actually do have a symbiotic relationship with their hosts. Or perhaps they're even just natural aspects of the biology?
I am contractually obligated to feature every single spider that shows up in this series, so Root Spider gets a writeup. It's just a giant spider in an underground cavern, with skulls littering its little warren. An elf (?) is running away from him. The effect isn't worth anywhere the 4 mana that the card demands, since it's juts getting some bonus effects if the Root Spider blocks. It is, admittedly, flavourful if it represents the Root Spider being more powerful if it is given the chance to ambush you (like a trap-door spider, which we saw in the previous expansion). Also, since this is an underground spider, this is one of the few MTG spiders to not have Reach.
We are starting off Red with an enchantment. Orcish Mine! It is quite a bad card, costing 3 mana and slowly, over multiple turns as the land it enchants gets tapped, Orcish Mine counts down to the destruction of that card. To illustrate how bad this is, Stone Rain from Alpha also costs 3 mana and just says "destroy target land". I like the art and the flavour, though, of this orc just happily chipping away at a giant stalactite/stalagmite pillar, the only thing holding the land up, and it's just getting more and more precarious until the land ultimately collapses. I appreciate the flavour, but this is admittedly one of the many cards from Homelands that is just bad.
Red has two major creature types being highlighted in Homelands, the first and the more interesting one being minotaurs... though unlike Fallen Empires and Ice Age, a lot of these minotaurs aren't even identified as minotaurs in their creature type text. The art style is quite trying to emulate Hurloon Minotaur from the original Alpha, which I thought was neat.
Anaba Bodyguard as a very photo-realistic cow head, while the Anaba Shaman has much softer features with a less boxy snout, longer (and almost rabbit-like) ears and horns that point straight upwards. My knowledge of ungulates isn't the best, but the Anaba Shaman actually looks a bit more like he's an antelope-person, isn't he? He's also got ritual tattoos around his face, similar to the original Hurloon Minotaur.
Anaba Ancestor is very cool, featuring a black silhouette of a minotaur's head, with a floating cow skull carved wit the same runes or tattoos that Hurloon Minotaur and Anaba Shaman are. It's a nice and slightly creepy way to represent the ancestral spirits watching over the living tribe. Anaba Ancestor is one of the two cards in this set that buffs other minotaurs, which, thanks to the wording in this set, isn't very good! Anaba Ancestor, as originally printed, is a 'Ghost' and Anaba Bodyguard is a 'Bodyguard'. It'd take some creature type retconning to fix this. Baron Sengir has the same vampire-tribal problem as well. Coming off of Ice Age and Fallen Empires, which did tribal synergy well, it is another unfortunate strike against Homelands.
The other half of Red's catalogue in Homelands are dwarves, which, for its credit, tries a bit to diverge from the Tolkien tropes of being blacksmiths and Viking-y warriors... but Dwarven Trader just looks like just some dude. He's a vanilla 1/1, and is just subjected to a rather eye-rolling 'selling family' joke.
I've always liked Aysen Crusader's artwork, with the combination of colours and hte many pieces of flowing cloths from her lance and horse barding. Aysen Crusader, just like Baron Sengir, tries to do another typal-tribal synergy by being buffed by 'Hero'. Aysen Crusader herself is not a Hero, and whereas Baron Sengir would have a lot of vampire friends to choose from, there is a grand total of... three Hero cards printed, and the last one is in Homelands.
The 'Hero' type would be obsoleted, and Aysen Crusader was errata'd to receive buffs from the much more numerous Soldier and Warrior creature type. Which would've been the end of it if recently, in 2024's (sigh) crossover lines with Marvel comics, MTG resurrected the 'Hero' creature type specifically for superheroes, with lots of superheroes being printed in the subsequent Marvel sets. I guess Aysen Crusader is just like, three decades ahead of the curve.
I just really like the specificity in the legendary card Soraya the Falconer. She just really, really likes falcons, and even has the ability to give falcons the infamously bad Banding. How does a falcon even 'band' in formation? But okay. WOTC would decide that they didn't want to be as specific with birds as with woodland mammals, so all birds are rolled into "Bird" and Soraya now buffs all kinds of birds from owls to canaries to whipporwills.
Trade Caravan is amazing with its interconnected art. I love it. Look at everything going on in this art! The giant long-legged white spider! The dinosaur on a chain! The bizare hedgehog-creature with a massive snout! It's very whimsical and adorable all around. I guess whoever was doing the great creature type update just gave up and shrugged and went "Human Nomad, why not" with this. Keep the caravan creature type, cowards!
Continuing Homelands printing cards that doesn't work within its own set, Leeches! Leeches is adorable as a card concept, going back to the time-tried medical bloodletting of the Dark Ages. I miss Assassin's Creed II and its plague doctors insisting that leeching is good for the liver! But Leeches-the-MTG-card removes poison counters (and damages the person that the poison is removed from) which is such a niche alternate-win condition at the time that this is printed. A grand total of zero cards deal poison counters in Homelands, and at the time of the expansion's release, only three cards dealt poison counter damage. Much later, in the Phyrexian expansions in the 2020's, poison counters would make a huge return... which makes Leeches, previously unique for being a terrible and overly-situational tech card, suddenly the only tech card to actually heal poison counters. It doesn't make Leeches suddenly playable, sadly.
Holy shit, what the fuck is that creature in Serra Bestiary? That sure is a surprisingly deformed face I didn't expect to see on a White card. It's a mutated humanoid (or just a human?) with blue skin and a tail. Serra herself is associated with the iconic Serra Angel from Alpha, a holy planeswalker who's involved in the backstory of Ulgortha. She, uh, apparently keeps some real weirdos in her bestiary!
Feroz's Ban is the in-universe reason that Ulgortha is separated from the rest of the Multiverse, trapping Baron Sengir in the plane. The actual spell causes creature cards to cost 2 more to cast (yours, too), and I like the art showing a planet trapped in a flask.
Roterothopter is a variation on the Ornithopter (and I think the second 'Thopter' artifact creature?). The effect of the card is quite bad, and even the guy in the flavour text doens't like it, but I like the Roterothoper having those Da Vinci spinning-turbine things as wings instead of, like, plane wings or helicopter rotos. That's actually adorable.
Clockwork Gnomes! One of the few 'Clockwork' creatures to not have the token gimmick in play (and instead has an overcosted regenerate effect), and it's the start of almost all gnomes in MTG being some kind of artifact creature... at least until the Dungeons & Dragons crossover brought regular flesh-and-blood gnomes back. These ones look like clockwork versions of the garden gnomes.
And with that, let's go to the rest of the cards!
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