Prepare your sonic screwdrivers: Magic: The Gathering today launched its latest set, Magic: The Gathering® Universes Beyond: Doctor Who™! Encapsulating 60 years of Doctor Who™ fandom into four Commander decks and collector boosters, fans can recreate their favorite moments from the beloved show on the tabletop, showing characters, villains, settings, and events from throughout the history of the long-running cult-classic television series.
Key details:
- We’re all stories in the end: The Doctor and every companion, the toughest enemies, and classic episodes spring to life right away in four Commander ready-to-play decks
- Timey-wimey but make it shiny: Every card features brand-new Doctor Who™ artwork, and Collector Boosters promise gorgeous TARDIS Showcase treatment cards and a chance at unique serialized Doctor cards
- Travel with your favorite Doctor: Brand-new cards and strategies bringing Doctor Who’s trademark “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey” mischief to your games
- Time and relative dimension in space: Expand your Planechase experience with brand-new locations from the Doctor’s adventures included with every Commander deck
This set brings a lot of new and interesting mechanics into Magic: The Gathering. An outline is listed below.
Doctor’s Companion
The Doctor hardly travels anywhere or anywhen without a companion. They are close friends, confidants, and in this case, second commanders. Doctor’s companion is a riff on the partner ability.
Each card with Doctor’s companion is a legendary creature. In Commander games, you may have two commanders if one of them is a card with Doctor’s companion and the other is “The Doctor.” That means a legendary Time Lord Doctor creature with no other creature types. So, one of the incarnations of the Doctor from the Doctor Who™ decks and not a legendary creature with changeling. Sorry, Morophon . We see right through you.
If you choose to have two commanders, your deck must conform to their combined color identities. For example, if your commanders were Yasmin Khan and The Thirteenth Doctor (who’s green and blue), your deck could include cards that were red, green, and/or blue.
During the game, the two commanders operate independently. For example, the “commander tax,” the additional cost to cast a commander from the command zone, is tracked for each commander separately. Similarly, commander damage dealt to player by each commander is tracked separately. If a card refers to “your commander,” it refers to both, although if it’s trying to perform an action on your commander, like put it into your hand, you choose which one it’s talking about.
Paradox
In Doctor Who™, paradoxes range from relatively harmless to universe ending. Fortunately, you don’t need to understand the Laws of Time to understand paradox abilities, you just need to cast spells from unusual places.
Paradox is an ability word that’s used to highlight abilities that care about casting spells from anywhere other than your hand. Often these abilities are triggered abilities that trigger whenever you do so. Some paradox abilities count the number of spells you’ve cast from anywhere other than your hand that turn to determine the magnitude of their effects.
Villainous Choice
The Doctor this. The Doctor that. Don’t forget there’s an entire deck dedicated to the glorious villains of the show, and they’d love nothing more than to force your opponents to face villainous choices!
Villainous choices offer opponents two unfortunate outcomes, but they get to choose which one befalls them. A player offered a villainous choice can always choose either option, even if the effect of that option turns out to not do anything. For example, if Davros points menacingly at an opponent with an empty hand, they can choose the discarding option and do nothing.
If multiple players are offered a villainous choice, the first opponent in turn order makes their choice, then that effect happens. Then, the next player makes their choice, that effect happens, and so on for each player faced with a villainous choice.
Time Travel
It’s about time. Time travel is, was, and always will be at the very heart of Doctor Who™. It’s also a new keyword action that allows you to manipulate the flow of events.
If you’re instructed to time travel, for each suspended card you own and each permanent you control with a time counter on it, you may add a time counter to it or remove a time counter from it. You make this choice for each one individually. For any of those cards or permanents, you may also choose to leave it be.
A suspended card is a card you’ve put into exile via the suspend ability, returning on cards such as Atraxi Warden.
If a card with suspend is in your hand, any time you could cast it, you may pay its suspend cost and exile it with the specified number of time counters on it. At the beginning of your upkeep, remove a time counter from it, and when the last is removed, you may cast it from exile without paying its mana cost. If it becomes a creature, the creature has haste. Obviously, time travel allows you to speed up this process (or even slow it down, if that’s your wish).
Planechase
There’s no better way to celebrate a show like Doctor Who™ than packing your entire game into a TARDIS—don’t worry, there’s plenty of room—and sending it travelling to different locations in time and space. Each Doctor Who™ Commander Deck comes with ten oversized Planechase cards, including both plane and phenomenon cards.
Doctor Who™ catalogs the adventures of a time-traveling alien and his human companions, exploring past, present, and future throughout the universe. Magic: The Gathering – Doctor Who™ captures the power and personality of the Doctor, their companions, the numerous villains seeking to dominate the universe, and the stories fans hold most dear to bring Doctor Who™ to life.
Will you join the Doctor or will you Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!?
You can buy all 4 of the Doctor Who Commander decks, as well as the Collectors Boosters, through your local card game shop that carries Magic: The Gathering products. If you need help finding your Local Card Game Shop, you can locate them via this link: https://locator.wizards.com/
