How To Play The Fourteenth Doctor Commander Deck In Magic: The Gathering

When the Doctor Who Commander decks were released for Magic: The Gathering, fans of the show expressed disappointment that there was no Doctor that could be the commander for a deck featuring ALL the Doctors. Thankfully, Wizards of the Coast didn’t leave them waiting long.

With the Doctor Who: Regeneration Secret Lair and the release of The Fourteenth Doctor you can now fit all seventeen Doctors into a single deck, and thanks to the Doctor’s Companion mechanic, you can even access all five colors of mana. So, without wasting any more time, let’s assemble Team TARDIS!

Sample Decklist

Since the commander is The Doctor (not ‘A’ doctor, ‘THE’ Doctor. The definitive article, you might say.), you can have a Doctor’s Companion in your Command Zone. We recommend Clara Oswald, who synergizes well with most Doctors and can add black to your color identity. This sample decklist incorporates her for this reason.

This decklist aims to play as a high-2 in the Commander Bracket system. Upgrades to reach Bracket 3 should include tutors to put Doctors in your graveyard, like Entomb, to use The Fourteenth Doctor more effectively.

The Commander

The Fourteenth Doctor is a 3/4 legendary Time Lord Doctor that costs one blue, one white, and one green or red mana to cast. He has two effects when he enters: First, when The Fourteenth Doctor enters, you get to look at the top 14 cards of your library and put all the Doctors into your graveyard. Then he can enter as a copy of any Doctor you put into your graveyard on that turn, but with haste.

The second ability allows The Fourteenth Doctor to replicate the abilities of any other Doctor, often at a lower cost than just playing the card normally. And his color identity makes The Fourteenth Doctor the only Doctor able to provide the color identity to include all other iterations of The Doctor in a single deck!

The Doctor Who Commander decks also introduced a variant of Partner, an ability that allows you to have two commanders. This version of Partner, called “Doctor’s Companion,” allows you to pick any card with Doctor’s Companion and include them in the command zone, giving you a second commander.

While there are several great options for a companion, Clara Oswald stands out. She’s a 2/6 colorless Human Advisor that causes all triggered abilities from Doctors to trigger twice, making her a Roaming Throne in your command zone.

While Clara Oswald is printed colorless, she has another ability that allows you to choose her color before the game as long as she’s your commander, allowing you to pick an extra color identity for your deck. For this build, we’re choosing black, to give you access to the rich resources in your graveyard after The Fourteenth Doctor mills your deck.

How To Build The Deck

The main reason to play The Fourteenth Doctor is that you want to play with all the Doctors, and that’s exactly what this deck aims to do. While several of the other Doctors synergize with each other, overall they’ve got such a diverse range of abilities that it can be difficult to choose a theme. Some care about sagas, others deal with suspend, and others care about artifacts.

The synergy split between all of these Doctors makes it difficult to land on a theme: a suspend theme will only benefit from one of the Doctors, while a historic theme will benefit from two different ones, and so on. But one thing they all have in common is that they’re all The Doctor, and that’s something to build around.

Four Commander decks and a Secret Lair provided plenty of cards that specifically support Doctors and Time Lords. The Fourteenth Doctor’s self-mill (and some other iterations’ self-mill and graveyard interactions), along with Clara Oswald’s black color identity, allows you to lean into a recursion theme to flood the board with Doctors and win by overwhelming your opponents.

Lacking tutors, Gallifrey Stands can’t be your main win condition, but you have more than enough Doctors to make it a secondary one. It allows you to play Doctors for free once per turn, and once you control thirteen, you win during your next upkeep.

Ramp

Since The Fourteenth Doctor has access to green’s extensive land ramp package, several land-fetch cards have been included. Three Visits, Farseek, Cultivate, and Search for Tomorrow are all available featuring Doctor Who art so that you can keep your deck on theme. The land base also leans a little heavily on green to facilitate these cards.

On top of the green ramp package and standard artifacts like Sol Ring, we’ve also included Chromatic Lantern, which can both generate any color mana and allow your lands to do the same. This will ensure that you always have the right kind of mana, in addition to helping you get enough of it.

Since all the Doctors and companions are legendary, the next mana rock is Relic of Legends. Like Chromatic Lantern, it taps for one mana of any color, but instead of allowing you to get any color mana from lands, it does the same for your legendary creatures. Suddenly, all of your Doctors are summoning more Doctors and casting spells like proper Wizards!

A Doctor Who deck wouldn’t be complete without a Sonic Screwdriver. It’s another three-mana rock, but it has additional utility: It can untap other artifacts, make creatures unblockable, and allow you to scry. The last bit is particularly useful with The Fourteenth Doctor, since it allows you to check your top card before you start to mill.

Morophon, the Boundless covers a lot of ground: Since it has changeling, it counts as a Doctor, allowing you to tutor for it, mill and copy it with your commander, and count it towards Gallifrey Stands. It’s also a lord for Doctors (or whatever type you choose, but choose Doctor), giving them al la passive +1/+1 boost.

The real benefit is that it reduces the casting cost of all your Doctors by one mana of each color. While this only affects the colored pips, since each Doctor has at least two, this effect makes all of your Doctors significantly cheaper to cast.

Draw

Having access to all five colors means you have access to all the best draw cards. But this deck is built for a theme, and you don’t want to get bogged down with a generic “good stuff” pile. But there are still plenty of good draw options!

The Second Doctor has a place in any Azorius (white/blue) group hug deck: it eliminates the maximum hand size for each player and allows every player to draw a card at the end of each of their turns. In exchange, if a player takes advantage of that draw, they can’t attack you on their next turn, so you get cards and protection!

Rose Noble is another popular companion for The Fourteenth Doctor, and we included her in the list for her ability to draw cards whenever you cast a Doctor or companion. She’s an excellent target for Quantum Misalignment, which allows you to make a nonlegendary copy of a creature, giving you the option to draw two cards for every Doctor you cast.

Arcade Gannon is a Fallout character, but he’s got the Doctor creature type, allowing him to interact with a lot of your important cards. He’s also got the ability to draw and discard cards while building up his ability to cast Humans and artifacts from your graveyard. Neither is common in this deck, but it’s nice to have options.

Giving other players more cards can lead to a bigger payoff from Windfall, too. If one of your opponents has a lot of cards in their hand, and you only have a few, Windfall can fill your hand while replacing everything your opponents stockpiled.

Heroes’ Podium isn’t exactly a card draw, but it does allow you to dig for legendary creatures from the top of your deck at instant speed. That way, you can keep mana free to counter spells, and before your turn starts, spend any extra to dig. Plus it buffs all of your Doctors!

Time Lord Regeneration

Casting each of your Doctors will get expensive really fast, but The Fourteenth Doctor can dump a lot of them into the graveyard all at once. In fact, with Roaming Throne and Clara Oswald, he can dump all Doctors from the top 42 cards of your deck into the graveyard.

To take advantage of the black identity provided by Clara Oswald, Living Death switches all creatures in play with all creatures in graveyards. Watch for your opponents to remove each other’s graveyards before using it to maximize the effect.

Patriarch’s Bidding is a better option if you aren’t playing against typal decks. When you cast it, each player names a creature type and reanimates all creatures in their graveyards with one of those types. You’ll want to name “Doctor”, but if someone else names “Human” you’ll get companions, too!

Finally, the best option is Primevals’ Glorious Rebirth, which reanimates all legendary permanents in your graveyard. This hits pretty much every creature in the deck, as well as a couple of other permanents.

The best part of Primevals’ Glorious Rebirth is that it hits Gallifrey Stands since it’s a legendary enchantment. That means you could discard it (or cast it and not worry about it being destroyed) and reanimate it when you have enough Doctors in your graveyard to win with!