‘Magic The Gathering’ Summons A Big Blue Box With New ‘Doctor Who’ Set

Welcome to the table,

I played Magic the Gathering for the first time in the fall of 1993. It fascinated me, because it was a card game but it had goblins and elves and pit fiends and rituals to dark gods. It had strategy and amazing art and there was an element of fantasy and the occult that felt forbidden in my world of religion and parental oversight.

What no one realized was that I was slowly amassing a collection of these cards from various events I was at, the older kids at Boy Scouts who would trade me cards for feats of self-endangerment, and doubles the well-off kids would just throw away in the large plastic trashcans in the lunch room. When I had money, it was spent on comics but I always had a deck or two of cobbled together well-worn MTG cards I could pull out and play anyone willing.

In the same way Dungeons & Dragons has been a part of my life for the majority of my life, MTG has always been there as a thing I got weirdly good at and actually enjoyed playing. When I got away from my family and forged out on my own I started playing MTG all the time. I had boxes and boxes of cards, so many in fact I donated them to a friend who was opening a comic and gaming shop and he was able to sustain his MTG sales off the collections for a good six months before the store got a regular rotation of customers.

Even now, I have boxes of MTG cards sitting next to my desk from the D&D-themed sets that came out last year. I don’t have friends to play with anymore and they have gone up in price, but I still like to collect when a set makes me smile and I keep an eye on the news as they drop new offerings. That brings me to something I think a lot of you Doctor Who fans may want to know a little more about.

Magic The Gathering is putting out a Doctor Who themed set through their Universes Beyond line, and this seems like something that collectors are really going to enjoy. Hot on the heels of The Lord of The Rings set, released to much fanfare and Post Malone-focused TikToks, comes Magic The Gatherings Universe Beyond Doctor Who. That is a mouthful so moving forward I’m going to be referring to it as the Doctor Who set.

Starting off aside from the regular cards in the set there are some fun foil options that include traditional foils that add a little extra shine to your decks. The commander decks from this set will be led, at least in three of the four decks, by the Doctors and their companions so you can scoop those up to grab foil versions there.

Those who like the darker side of the universe can check out Davros, Dalek Creator, and Missy in the Masters of Evil deck. Collectors will be able to find every card in the Commander decks, apart from the plane cards, in traditional foil in the Doctor Who booster packs. All of the Eternal-legal cards, like reprints, new-to-Magic cards, and tokens, will be available in Collector Boosters. So if you are buying boxes and packs you should still be able to find almost all of what you are looking for.

There are also Surge foils that will be making an appearance in this set. Surge foils are cool because they have a real metallic vibe to them.

I love a Sol Ring. Surge foil versions of Commander cards (except for the plan cards) from this set can also be found in the collector booster packs.

This set is also going to have cards with a TARDIS treatment. Thirty cards, including three uncommons, 23 rares, and 5 mythic rares, will have a variant TARDIS showcase treatments. They depict the characters of Doctor Who framed with really cool blue colored TARDIS-themed artwork.

Cards with the TARDIS treatment are only available in Collector Boosters. While the traditional versions of these cards more closely resemble their show-accurate counterparts, the TARDIS showcase variants have a really nice stylistic flourish to them that fans of alternate art will really dig. The TARDIS treatment cards will be in the Collector Boosters.

In more recent sets there has been a push to do Extended Art cards, and the Doctor Who set will feature extended-art variants of these cards where more artwork is on display. Rare and mythic rare reprints and new-to-Magic cards will receive the extended-art treatment. Sagas will not have extended-art frames so they won’t get those treatments but check out the images below for an idea of what to expect.

The extended-art cards can also be found in traditional foil and surge foil. All extended-art reprints and new-to-Magic cards can be found in Collector Booster packs in non-foil, traditional foil, and surge foil.

A really cool feature I think Doctor Who fans are going to be all about is the serialized Doctor Who cards. Each main incarnation of the Doctor, from the First Doctor to the Thirteenth Doctor, will receive a serialized variant with the TARDIS showcase treatment. These cards will be printed in double rainbow foil and marked with their own serial number, each card will receive only about 500 printings and can only be found in Collector Boosters so I feel like the collectors market is going to go crazy for these.

The serialized Doctor cards are localized in English only and are available in Collector Boosters of any language. Non-serialized Doctor cards are mechanically identical to serialized variants. As a note though the images above are digital renderings and not the actual cards.

You can check out more at this link and enjoy the set when it drops on October 13, 2023. Right now you should be able to preorder from places like TCG and Amazon, and if you have a local game shop they should be able to get your preorders in as well.

Until next time, the subtitle For the TARDIS noise in Doctor Who Is “VWORP!” so the title of this article was almost “I play VWORP!VWORP!VWORP!”