How to Hermit Druid

[Kemev]

A few years ago, the folks at MTGthesource developed one of the most broken and resilient doomsday machines in the format: 5 color Hermit Druid. A friend of mine actually sleeved the deck up for a while, and spent a year or two terrorizing GP side events with it... it remains to date the most consistent and highest win percent deck I've ever seen. For better or worse, it's gotten less attention in the last couple years, as Hulk/Flash, Scepter combos, and various 4-color builds have taken the limelight. It's still worth understanding though, especially since other relevant combos can slot into it.

THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE

(why don't my cards line up! raaaarrghh)

Here's how the machine's engine works*: Get Hermit Druid in play, and activate him. Put your entire library into your graveyard. Put a couple cheap-from-the-graveyard creatures into play. Use your cheap creatures to flashback Dread Return, bringing back Angel of Glory's Rise. Bing back an assortment of humans, which needs to include Laboratory Maniac, and a human that draws a card (Azami, Lady of Scrolls or Hapless Researcher). Draw your card, triggering Lab Man. Congratulations, victory is yours!

*Note: contains no actual Doomsday. Unless you wanna (see Plan Bs, next post)

THE GEARS IN THE MACHINE

While there are a plenty of different ways to put an exact list together, here are the essentials:

Lands (33)
This will vary based on your exact list, but they must all be non-basic (or Hermit Druid won't work). This is a speedy combo (and a color intensive one at that) so all of your lands need to enter untapped, and tap for colored mana. The only utility land that should be considered is Bazaar of Baghdad. Additionally, while the original list was 5-color, red is not a critical if you'd prefer to play 4-color instead.

Core combo cards (4-5): Hermit Druid, Dread Return, Angel of Glory's Rise, Azami, Lady of Scrolls, and/or Hapless Researcher

Tutors (12-15): There's a list of A-list tutors out there (hopefully someone will put together a list for this forum), but I'm not gonna go through all of them here... I'm just gonna hit a handful that I think are especially useful. You'll probably end up with a dozen or more cards that find other cards.

Survival of the Fittest: Besides being a useful tutor, it's also a critical discard outlet. You don't want to get Angel, Azami, or Lab Man stuck in your hand when you're ready to combo off.
Entomb: Sometimes it's easiest to put Hermit Druid into play from your graveyard
Intuition: Like Entomb, but slower and stronger
Muddle the Mixture: Mediocre tutor, ok counterspell, necessary blue card to pitch to Force of Will
Eldritch Evolution: Puts Hermit Druid into play off a dork, or Lab Man into play off of Hermit Druid
Neoform: See above. These cards are handy if you suspect someone might try to counter your Dread Return; if they get countered, you're inconvenienced, not dead. They also work around Gaddock Teeg.

Recursion (6ish): These are the cards I recommend. You have some flexibility here... depending on which tutors you play you might trim one or two. If you look at older lists, you might see Shallow Graves; I don't recommend it because it's limited to the top card of your library, which is easy to mess up. And 3 mana is a lot for this list, so I would stay away from Necromancy and others.

Reanimate
Animate Dead
Unearth
Postmortem Lunge
Life // Death
Revival // Revenge

Support Dorks (12): Die nerds! These guys are mostly here for Dread Return, but a few of them provide extra fizz for your sinister brew.

Narcomoeba: Free off Hermit Druid activation!
Fatestitcher: ...mostly free off Hermit Druid activation...
Snapcaster Mage: besides usual Snapcaster tricks, also counts as a Human for Angel, and Wizard (if you run Azami)
Deathrite Shaman: A mana dork that occasionally craps on an opposing graveyard combo
Sylvan Safekeeper: a combo protecting human wizard. Semi-optional, but a solid T1 play. Being green makes it easier to tutor for if you feel the need (ie, Green Sun's Zenith)
Grand Abolisher: combo protector, human. Mostly an upgrade over Sylvan Safekeeper.
Birds of Paradise: This and the rest of the mana dorks speed you up a turn, and again provide fodder for Dread Return
Noble Heirarch
Avacyn's Pilgrim
Elves of the Deep Shadow
Llanowar Elves
Fyndhorn Elves

Support Spells (5): As with the tutors, I'm not gonna run through every A-list, Eternal staple that should probably go in a cEDH list. But these particular cards are essential for however you build this deck.

Pull from Eternity: Combos with Memory's Journey
Memory's Journey: Combos with Pull from Eternity
Gitaxian Probe: Free draw to trigger Lab Man, flashback-able off Snapcaster Mage
Tainted Pact: If for some reason you can't activate Hermit Druid (maybe you're trapped under Cursed Totem), Tainted Pact can clear your library for you if you name a card that's not in your deck.

MUAHAHAHA YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE LAST OF ME

So the biggest piece of tech that Kuma and the crew at the Source discovered is the interaction between Pull From Eternity and Memory's Journey. If something goes wrong, and an opponent drops a graveyard exiling effect on you at a poor time, these two cards can save you. You can flashback Memory's Journey to shuffle Pull and two other relevant cards back into your Library, and if you still can't win, use Pull to bring back Memory's Journey and keep trying. You can also build your own pseudo-Doomsday piles with Lab Man and appropriate cantrips, as needed.

These two cards give you an extraordinary amount of resilience, and unless someone can trap you under a Rest in Peace or Leyline of the Void, you're never really out of the game. Players who are inexperienced in cEDH consistently overestimate their ability to deploy enough graveyard hate, and these cards will punish them for it.

[Kemev]

THE PLAN Bs

One of the cool parts about the shell above is that it's in the range of 72-76 cards, which leaves you 28 to 24 slots left to fill. A lot of those slots will get taken up by format staples... ie, Force of Will and other counterspells, a few cantrips like Brainstorm and friends, and plenty of cheap removal like Nature's Claim and Abrupt Decay for clearing opposing Grafdigger's Cages and the like. (As an aside, Force of Negation is kinda crummy in this list, since you can't free cast it during your turn to protect a Dread Return or other sorcery speed combo starter. Force of Vigor, on the other hand, is likely to be really, really, good for you, although I haven't done the math on how many green cards you'd need available to pitch.)

The exact mix will ultimately depend on your local metagame, but it will also depend on what kinds of Plan B wins you decide to add to the mix. You'll probably need to fill at least 20 slots with staple effects, and the Hermit Druid combo alone is good enough to go all in on. However, you'll probably end up with 4-6 "flex" slots, and if you'd like to run a back-up plan, there are plenty of good options. Here are a few:

Protean Hulk + Flash: This is probably your A-list option. The deck is gonna end up with plenty of creature and spell tutors, and this gives you an alternate way to assemble your Lab Man win. Having Flash in the deck also gets you an additional out if you end up drawing your Angel of Glory's Rise and can't get rid of it otherwise.

Doomsday: As with Hulk/Flash, you're already built around ditching most of your library and winning off Labratory Maniac, so Doomsday is an easy supplement to this plan. If you decide to run it, you probably want to add a few extra cantrips to make assembling a winning pile easier. One advantage is that Doomsday isn't graveyard dependent like Hulk/Flash, so it does give you more outs if you get trapped by Grafdigger's Cage or a similar effect. I really like Doomsday, but one of the biggest disadvantages is that it's not an easy card to play with. It also needs quite a bit of mana if you plan on casting and winning all in one turn.

Scion of the Ur-Dragon (with Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon and/or Moltensteel Dragon): If you run a 5-color build, this is a good option that actually makes your Commander relevant. This gives you another decent out to that jerk with the hate cards... you can simply murder them.

Scion of the Ur-Dragon (with Worldgorger Dragon): You've got a dragon general that can tutor for Worldgorger, and you've already got Animate Dead in the deck, so maybe this is an option...? I don't have a ton of respect for the combo, since having someone drop a Nature's Claim on you at the wrong time knocks you out of the game. Even if things work out, you still need a third card to give your Worldgorger+Animate Dead a payload, and your options are a bit derpy (Oona, Queen of the Fae is probably your best bet).

Bomberman: As it turns out Auriok Salvagers is a human you could reanimate with Angel of Glory's Rise, or grab with Hulk, or reanimate on its own, and then use it to go infinite with Lion's Eye Diamond. I stumbled on this one in a couple tappedout lists, but I think it's scraping the bottom of the barrel. First, if you're reanimating Salvagers, you could probably be reanimating Lab Man instead, in which case, what are you doing with the Salvagers? I also don't care for LED much in this build. Part of the advantage to having a quick, low CMC combo is that it's easier to leave mana up for your own answers and counters, so I don't pitching your hand to LED makes much sense here. If you did want to run bomberman, I'd suggest playing Thrasios as one of your generals, since he's a ready-made mana sink for the combo.

Other options...?: I'm sure there's other plays out there that thread together with Hermit Druid, so feel free to set me straight.

In the meantime, happy hunting!

[Dam0]

Shallow Grave and Corpse Dance are two of your best reanimation spells, as they give Hermit Druid Haste and they are instants. You only need to tap the Hermit Druid once to do it's job - you don't care that it's exiled after.

Seeing how you specifically describe why you don't run Shallow Grave, I felt like you don't really know what you're talking about.