Doctor Who Commander MTG Cards: Fifteen First Impressions!

Until I started dating my partner Wendy seven years ago, I’d never watched an episode of Doctor Who before. Wendy was a fan of the modern run of the show and watched it with her kids, and eagerly showed me some of her favorite episodes. I enjoyed all the ones she picked out for me to watch, and while my Doctor Who knowledge is still quite shallow, I do know just enough to appreciate some of the Doctor Who Commander cards from a flavor perspective. But being a huge fan of Commander is enough for me to love many of them just as awesome Magic cards that I’m eagerly looking forward to putting into Commander decks.

And there are a ton of new cards here! There are a whopping 50 new cards in each of the four Doctor Who Commander decks, so if you’re excited about these new cards too, be sure to pop by and read my columns over the coming weeks as I pore over the list. 

I’ll hold off going over the various Doctors and Doctor’s companions until I’ve more time to dig into them, but rest assured that I’ll be doing deep dives on several of them, as well as a couple of the other legendary characters.  But there’s still a ton to look at, so let’s get started!

Weeping Angel

The first Doctor Who episode Wendy had me watch is “Blink”, and it really delivered on creepy suspense!  Weeping Angel is a great design that captures the scary Alien Angels from the show. If you look at them, they freeze into statues, realized mechanically by the card not being a creature whenever an opponent casts a creature spell. If you’re not looking at them – if you blink – then they move, and bad things can happen.

In Commander, this is an awesome card for Dimir decks, since its flash ability allows you to hold up mana for instants you may want to cast in response, or you can flash it in to ambush an attacker. Shuffling the creature Weeping Angel deals combat damage to (note its first strike ability) back into the library will often be better than putting it in the graveyard.

It’s important to remember that Weeping Angel doesn’t actually have flying, despite its wings, because in the show, the Aliens just took the shape of Angels but didn’t actually fly.  This actually breaks a rule that Wizards of the Coast (WotC) has followed for decades now, where if the art shows a creature with wings, it needs to have flying. This is because, in the early days of Magic, there were a handful of creature cards with wings in the art but didn’t actually have flying, causing confusion with players.  Whippoorwill, I’m looking at you:

I have a great story about this time in Magic regarding this confusion, so if you see me online or in person sometime, ask me about it!

Anyway, Weeping Angel is awesome, both flavorfully and as an incredible Commander card!

Adipose Offspring

I believe I’ve seen the episode this comes from, and it’s super-creepy despite how cute the Aliens look on the artwork – and the show!  Emerge is the perfect mechanic here, since I believe these creatures consume their host to make more Aliens. High-toughness creatures pair up great with this card, though the tokens are 2/2 creatures, so they don’t exactly play well with that theme. I’m tempted to put one of these in my Kynaios and Tiro of Meletis deck, since my commander has a whopping eight toughness. I could see it doing some nice work as a way to sacrifice a high-toughness creature in a Colfenor, the Last Yew deck.  Or imagine activating Tree of Perdition to swap an opponent’s life total with the Tree’s toughness, and then using Adipose Offspring’s emerge ability to get twenty or more 2/2 Alien tokens? 

RMS Titanic

So, we get a flying Ball Lightning in Vehicle form that will also generate a bunch of Treasure tokens for you?  Heck yeah, sign me up! If you’ve got a deck that can run Greasefang, Okiba Boss and RMS Titanic in the 99, let me know, because I want inspiration.

Flesh Duplicate

I’m not familiar with this wild-looking Shapeshifter and am definitely curious as to why it’s a Rebel, but there’s no doubt this is an incredible Magic card!  A two-mana Clone variant has tournament-power pedigree with Phantasmal Image, and Flesh Duplicate might be slightly better if the double blue mana isn’t a concern. Vanishing 3 isn’t that big of a drawback since you’ll get use of it for several turns, and if you’re playing ways to increase the time counters with proliferate or the new Doctor Who mechanic time travel, you can potentially keep Flesh Duplicate around the entire game.

From the Doctor Who mechanics article on the Magic mothership:

The Foretold Soldier

Okay, I’m pretty sure The Foretold Soldier will be a lot of fun for green decks, especially ones that don’t have many ways to kill opposing creatures. For four mana you get a 6/6 Alien Zombie Soldier, it must be blocked if able, and it can’t be blocked by more than one creature. In most Commander pods you should be able to find one opponent you can attack and survive combat, and when it smashes the likely smaller blocker, it gets exiled and becomes foretold, and for just two mana you can recast it and go again. Note that green has ways to pay you for casting a big monster over and over again, such as The Guardian Project, Garruk’s Uprising, and of course The Great Henge.

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

Okay, I have zero clue what this card is representing, but I’m here for it!  That’s especially true with The Lost Caverns of Ixalan coming out next month, bringing a bunch of new Dinosaurs for us to play with.

I love that Dinosaurs on a Spaceship comes with its own army of Dinosaur tokens it you suspend it, and these little 2/2 Dinosaurs have flying and haste!  Eventually Dinosaurs on a Spaceship comes down and gives all your other Dinosaurs +1/+1 and vigilance and trample, which is just about the perfect “lord” for a Dinosaur deck. This is definitely the kind of card that you’d like to time travel and remove counters from to pump out the Dinosaur tokens faster and get Dinosaurs on a Spaceship cast ahead of schedule.

Flaming Tyrannosaurus

As if a T-Rex isn’t terrifying enough, this one is on fire and throwing damage around willy-nilly!  Magic has leaned into playing cards from exile lately, and Flaming Tyrannosaurus plays great with those designs. Etali, Primal Conqueror springs to mind, and hey—it’s a Dinosaur too! If you’re running a Prosper, Tome-Bound or Yidris, Maelstrom Wielder or Etali, Primal Storm Commander deck, you might want to slot this monster in the 99!

The Moment

This seems like a cool and flavorful design, but I’m not sure how much I like it for Commander. It’s obviously going to be best in a deck that can add time counters on it once you’ve passed your first upkeep, but once you’ve added a couple of counters, opponents will have incentive to stop putting nonland permanents on the battlefield, slowing the progress of the game considerably.  If you’ve ever played a multiplayer game where an opponent has an untapped Nevinyrral’s Disk on the battlefield, you’ll know what I’m talking about. I do like that you can phase out your own creatures before you sacrifice The Moment, and if they have Equipment or Auras, you can save those too.

City of Death

The wording on this card made me chuckle a bit: specifically, “target non-Saga token.” If you’re a bit confused about where Saga tokens might come from, you’ve likely not yet run across the wild combos with Three Blind Mice from Wilds of Eldraine. Recently I watched an Arena gameplay video where someone used Tamiyo, Compleated Sage’s ability to exile a nonland permanent card from your graveyard and make a token copy of it, and if you make a copy of Three Blind Mice, its second and third chapters can make a token copy of itself, generating a constant barrage of Three Blind Mice Saga tokens and a growing army of 1/1 white Mouse tokens.

For whatever reason, the designers did not want City of Death to go down the same road! But if you like Treasure tokens or any other tokens in your green deck, City of Death seems like a great addition with a whopping five chapters that makes a copy of any of your non-Saga tokens.

Into the Time Vortex

People love cascade decks, and Into the Time Vortex goes right in. Between the cascade ability and the rebound ability, it will juice up the various cards that care about casting cards from anywhere other than your hand too. There are even cards that care about casting more than one spell a turn, and this helps those decks too, such as Storm of Saruman; Jori En, Ruin Diver; and Tomb of Horrors Adventurer.

Everybody Lives!

This card is going to be responsible for so many cheers and groans in future Commander games and I am here for it! I love that every word on this card tries its best to ensure that no creatures are dying, and no players are losing this turn. I kind of wish it had split second too, but that might have been too much. I’ll want to run this in so many decks, but I worry the singles price will be rather high.

All of History, All at Once

I have to admit, I don’t have any storm decks and rarely play them myself because of the amount of brain energy it typically takes to play them well.  But this card looks super-fun, and I’m looking forward to watching someone pop off with this thing. Time travel, time travel, time travel, time travel!

Return the Past

Burn decks rejoice!  Here’s another six-mana enchantment to go in your deck alongside Arcane Bombardment to enable your late-game big turns. It also works great alongside red’s many rummage spells like Thrill of Possibility and Big Score.

Rotating Fireplace

I’ve always wanted to live in a house that had a rotating fireplace that revealed some cool secret chamber or secret passageway beyond, but I’ll happily settle for a cardboard version for now. WotC has done a lot in recent years to make mana rocks that cost three mana be more appealing to Commander fans, and this one certainly does, especially if your deck can really take advantage of the time travel ability. Its ability to generate more and more mana as the time counters increase is really going to be powerful.

Karvanista, Loyal Lupari

I’ll wrap things up for today with a delightfully weird legendary creature: Karvanista, Loyal Lupari!  It’s fascinating that this card cares so much about Humans and yet it’s not a Human itself, and I think it would be sweet to build a mono-green Human deck lead by a legendary Alien Dog Soldier commander.  Since it’s got an Adventure, you can cast Lupari Shield to exile it and then nearly always just cast it for five mana from exile throughout the game. And once it hits the battlefield, it’s got vigilance, trample, and haste, and when it attacks – with haste – it gives +1/+1 counters to all your Humans, whether they’re attacking or not.  Humans like Champion of Lambholt or Pir, Imaginative Rascal!

There are some green cards that care about Humans, like Heronblade Elite and Laid to Rest. And don’t forget creatures with changeling count as Humans: Realmwalker, Chameleon Colossus, and Bloodline Pretender are cards you could round out your Human deck with.

Wow, I feel like I’ve only just scratched the surface of new cards from Doctor Who Commander!  Which cards are you most excited to put in your Commander decks?  Which legendary creature are you definitely building a new Commander deck for?  And what outlandish tokens are you looking forward to copying with City of Death?

Talk to Me

Do me a solid and follow me on Twitter!  I run polls and start conversations about Commander all the time, so get in on the fun!  You can also find my LinkTree on my profile page there with links to all my content.

I’d also love it if you followed my Twitch channel TheCompleteCommander, where I do Commander, Brawl, and sometimes other Magic-related streams when I can.  If you can’t join me live, the videos are available on demand for a few weeks on Twitch, but I also upload them to my YouTube channel.  You can also find the lists for my paper decks over on Archidekt if you want to dig into how I put together my own decks and brews. 

And lastly, I just want to say: let us love each other and stay healthy and happy.