Magic: The Gathering’s Doctor Who set reveals cards for Tenth Doctor, TARDIS and daleks, plus fish fingers in custard

Magic: The Gathering has revealed more of the cards in its upcoming Doctor Who set, including our first proper look at the Tenth Doctor, the TARDIS and daleks - oh, and fish fingers in custard.

MTG’s Doctor Who set was announced last summer, revealing a release date this October ahead of the British TV show’s 60th anniversary and the debut of Ncuti Gatwa’s 14th Doctor.

Since then, we’ve seen plenty of Whovian artwork, a glimpse of the set’s take on land cards and a first look at the returning Planechase format - in the form of plane and phenomenon cards that introduce various ongoing effects to each match - as a way of following the Doctor and their companions’ travels through time and space.

Thanks to the latest MTG Doctor Who card reveals at this week’s San Diego Comic Con, we’ve been given a look at three new planes, multiple appearances for David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor, the TARDIS - both inside and out - and a saga card representing the series’ iconic Bad Wolf storyline, along with token cards for several of the Doctor’s foes, including the legendary daleks.

The new planes including the TARDIS bay, which adds cascade to the first spell cast on each turn for mana value two or more - allowing the player to exile cards from their library to the bottom of their deck until they reach a nonland card worth less than the card they played, before being able to cast it for free. The plane’s chaos ability - activated when the planeswalker symbol is rolled on the planar die - gives the player control of a target artifact before planeswalking to a new location as usual.

Bad Wolf Bay, which will likely bring a lump to the throat of Doctor Who fans of a certain era, instead allows players to exile a target creature at the start of combat, returning it to its owner at the start of the next end step. Its chaos ability stops exiled cards from entering the battlefield that turn.

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The third newly-revealed plane card is The Doctor’s Tomb on Trenzalore, the super-sized TARDIS that served as the climactic location of the three-episode finale to Matt Smith’s tenure as the 11th Doctor. The card exiles creatures instead of dying, forcing their controller to lose two life. When chaos ensues, the active player is able to swap around players’ life totals.

Joining the two plane cards was a new phenomenon, Fixed Point in Time, which forces chaos to ensue the next time a player would planeswalk until their next turn.

The Bad Wolf arc also makes an appearance on saga card The Parting of the Ways, which allows the player to add time counters before time travelling twice - using the set’s time travel mechanic to add or remove time counters from suspended and permanent cards (with a token). In its third step, the saga allows the player to destroy a target artifact controlled by each of their opponents.

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The TARDIS card - which was shown off in both its normal appearance and the new TARDIS Showcase frame treatment - has flying (of course - you’ll need to provide your own noises as it takes off though), Crew 2 - allowing creatures with a total value of at least two to be tapped to make it an artifact creature for the rest of the turn - and the ability to cascade the next spell cast and planeswalk when it attacks (with 2/4) if the player also controls a Time Lord.

One of those Time Lords could be the Tenth Doctor, who also saw a standard card and TARDIS Showcase appearance - with cartoony artwork of David Tennant - revealed. A legendary creature with 3/5, the Tenth Doctor references two of Tennant’s memorable quotes with Allons-y! and Timey-Wimey. The first allows the card to exile cards until the player finds a nonland card, before placing three time counters on it and gaining suspend, whenever the Tenth Doctor attacks. The second allows the card to time travel three times as a sorcery at the cost of seven colourless mana.

We got a first look at some of the tokens appearing in the set, too, including a look at Jodie Whittaker’s 13th Doctor discovering a Clue - a token that can draw a card by paying two mana and sacrificing the token - and a reference to the unusual diet of Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor on a Food token showing fish fingers and custard. (Which can pay two mana, tap and be sacrificed to gain back three life.)

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Two of the Doctor’s foes made a first appearance in tokens, with the generic Alien Insect - a flying 1/1 - and the iconic Dalek, a 3/3 with Menace: meaning it can’t be blocked by a single creature. The daleks’ legendary catchphrase Exterminate! appears on a separate sorcery card costing two colourless and a single Black mana, granting the ability to replicate by tapping a dalek to copy the spell as many times as cards tapped, before destroying a target creature and damaging their controller for three life.

All of the cards will appear in the four Commander decks that make up MTG’s Doctor Who set, as part of its Universes Beyond series of crossovers. Timey-Wimey teams up the Ninth, Tenth and Eleventh Doctors - plus their respective companions - while Blast from the Past features the first eight Doctors and Paradox Power the 12th and 13th Doctors. Masters of Evil, meanwhile, brings together the Doctor’s various enemies. Additional cards with the TARDIS Showcase frame treatment will appear alongside other rare and holographic cards in separate collector booster packs.

Magic: The Gathering’s Doctor Who set will be released on October 13th.