Magic: The Gathering: 5 Best Combos From Doctor Who Commander

Summary

• The Universes Beyond: Doctor Who collection introduces 200 new themed cards to Magic: The Gathering, offering players new synergies and combos to explore.
• The Missy + Goblin Bombardment + Ruthless Ripper combo allows players to execute a powerful combo with infinite enter and leave the battlefield triggers and damage.
• Pairing The Tenth Doctor with Chronomantic Escape or Rousing Refrain creates strategic advantages such as protection from attacks or infinite loops of cast triggers and mana generation.

Crossing time and space comes the mind-bending Universes Beyond: Doctor Who collection to Magic: The Gathering. This new set includes four preconstructed decks, each one designed around specific characters, eras, and mechanics that work thematically with the show’s history.

Magic: The Gathering – The 10 Best Companions In Universes Beyond: Doctor Who

Check out the best Doctor Who companions featured in Magic: The Gatherings Universes Beyond crossover with the titular Time Lord.

200 new Doctor Who-themed cards are entering Commander, bringing with them all sorts of new synergies and combos for players to explore. Many of the combos here are fairly versatile, with functional redundancies across cards that have similar mechanics, so the combos listed are not the only way to build your deck. If you’re thinking of building a Doctor Who Commander deck and need a way to secure a win, consider tossing one of these combos to help you seal the deal

5 Missy + Goblin Bombardment + Ruthless Ripper

Once you get all three cards in play you can execute a powerful combo that gives you an infinite number of enter and leave the battlefield triggers, death triggers, and infinite damage. Missy is a unique legendary creature, turning any nonartifact creature you control into a face down 2/2 Cyberman artifact creature instead of going to the graveyard.

This works fantastically with cards with morph, since they don’t care how or why they’re face down, just if you can pay the cost to flip it back up. Ruthless Ripper has an extremely easy price to pay to flip it, all you have to do is reveal a black card from your hand to turn it back over.

Magic: The Gathering – The 10 Best Red Cards In Universes Beyond: Doctor Who

Three of the four Doctor Who's MTG decks include red, with some great cards for Commander.

Once it’s flipped back over, you sacrifice it to Goblin Bombardment, dealing one damage to any target, and turning Ruthless Ripper back into a facedown Cyberman to repeat the cycle over and over until you’re the last player standing.

4 The Tenth Doctor + Chronomantic Escape

Sometimes you just want to sit back and relax a little without the looming threat of your opponents attacking. Pairing The Tenth Doctor up with the suspend card Chronomantic Escape keeps you safe turn after turn.

Chronomantic Escape has a suspend count of three, which is convenient since The Tenth Doctor time travels three times. With his ability you can cast Chronomantic Escape immediately for a total of nine mana. Chronomantic Escape also reexiles itself upon resolution, letting you cast it from exile again next turn.

You need a fair amount of mana to keep the combo going, especially if you want to be able to cast other spells during your turn making this either a late-game strategy or one where you have other cards exiled to capitalize on The Tenth Doctor’s timey-wimey ability.

3 The Tenth Doctor + Rousing Refrain

Back again for a round of infinite loops, The Tenth Doctor paired with Rousing Refrain gives you all sorts of cast triggers, infinite mana, and even magecraft triggers. Rousing Refrain adds one red mana for each card in an opponent’s hand and then suspends itself when it resolves with three more time counters.

Magic: The Gathering - The 10 Best White Cards In Universes Beyond: Doctor Who

Much like The Doctor, white is dedicated to ensuring fair play across the universe in MTG's Doctor Who Commander decks.

Using that seven mana, you can activate The Tenth Doctor’s ability again, removing all three time counters from Rousing Refrain then adding more mana back to your mana pool. If an opponent happens to have eight or more cards in hand, you can net infinite mana this way too.

Executing this combo requires an opponent to have at least seven cards in hand, making it a little more situational than other combos, but this can be mitigated through other cards like Storm-Kiln Artist, which creates a Treasure token every time you cast or copy a spell.

2 Donna Noble + Boros Reckoner

If you’re sick and tired of all those fancy spell combos and just want to smack an opponent with infinite damage, then Donna Noble is the way to go. Donna has an incredibly thematic ability called Soulbond which pairs her up with another creature when she comes into play. Then, if she or the paired creature would take damage Donna deals that much damage to an opponent.

Boros Reckoner has a special ability that lets it take damage dealt to it and redirects it to a creature or player as well. You have to give Boros Reckoner indestructible as well, but once you do all you have to do it deal some amount of damage to it. Both Donna and the Reckoner will trigger, having Donna dealing the damage to your opponent, and the Reckoner dealing it back to itself.

Since more damage was dealt to the Reckoner again, both creatures will trigger again, creating a cycle of infinite damage to take down any opponent’s life totals.

1 River Song + Timestream Navigator

One of the strangest Magic cards to ever be printed, River Song has you draw cards from the bottom of your library instead of the top. There are a few ways to take advantage of this ability but one of the most straightforward ones is with Timestream Navigator.

For just four mana, you can tap Timestream Navigator to put it on the bottom of your library to take an extra turn. Normally this is a one-time use, once it’s on the bottom of your deck there’s not really many ways to reliably go get the creature again but since River has you draw from the bottom of your deck, you’ll always have it available.

Timing is very important in this combo; you have to activate Timestream Navigator in your upkeep so that when you move to your draw step, you draw it, giving you the ability to cast it and then on your extra turn, you can activate its ability again. You’ll also want a reliable way to draw extra cards and some way to deal damage during your infinite turns since you’re always going to be drawing the same Timestream Navigator turn after turn.

Next: Magic: The Gathering – Every Doctor In Universes Beyond: Doctor Who, Ranked