After making four wildly popular Warhammer 40,000 Commander decks last year, Magic: The Gathering is giving the same love to Doctor Who. Today we’re excited to reveal 14 cards from those decks, including multiple from the iconic Weeping Angel-fueled episode Blink, alongside a chat with Principal Game Designer Gavin Verhey about the cards themselves and how this crossover is a “dream project” for him.
Click through the gallery below to see 10 brand new Doctor Who cards and 4 Planeshift cards from the upcoming decks, and read on to see our full interview with Verhey. Wizards of the Coast will also be hosting a Doctor Who debut livestream on the MTG Twitch and YouTube channels on Tuesday, Oct 3 at 10am PT with even more reveals.
IGN: Okay, to start, from one big Doctor Who nerd to another, how excited are you to finally be able to show off these cards?
Gavin Verhey, Principle Game Designer: SO EXCITED!!
For those who don’t know me, my name is Gavin Verhey and I’m a Principal Game Designer on Magic. I’m also a GIGANTIC Doctor Who fan. I have visited Doctor Who conventions, cosplayed as the Doctor, slept on the sidewalk to get into the San Diego ComicCon panel, and even used to have a full-scale TARDIS in my home. So to say this was a dream project is… Putting it lightly!
Do you have a favorite of the bunch we just revealed? Has your favorite overall been shown off yet?
You all have some real sweet previews today – including a couple of my favorites! But I have to call out Genesis of the Daleks as an epic saga that I really enjoy.
In this iconic fourth doctor episode, we see where the Daleks came from – and what led Davros to do so. It pumps out so many Daleks: when people read this card during playtests, it was always “wait.. For EACH lore counter??” That’s so many Daleks!”
You also get the end of this episode featured on another of your previews: Crisis of Conscience, where the Doctor has to decide if he wants to destroy all the daleks or not – if he has the right to commit genocide himself. It’s a powerful moment – and in Magic, choosing how and when to sweep the board can go a long way!
We also revealed four new planechase cards, which is a mechanic that makes a lot of sense for Doctor Who. How did you decide which locations felt significant enough for their own planechase cards?
A lot of hearty debate! *laughs*
Truly though, it took a ton of discussion. We tried to get locations from a mix of different episodes with different locales, ranging from locations in the past to planets to even spacecraft. That way, it really does feel like you could end up anywhere in space and time! It was also a way to show off some episodes that didn’t otherwise make it onto cards. There are so many episodes of Doctor Who and only so many cards to make, that planechase gave us a few extra places! For example, we didn’t end up with any specific card design that calls back to the episode The God Complex, which was an episode many of us liked – but we were able to get it into the planechase deck. You’ll have to wait to see what it does though!
Today we got to show off Blink, based on the iconic episode that introduced the Weeping Angels, as well as a couple cards themed around it. Weeping Angels are getting a lot of representation across all the new cards, what drew you toward exploring them in multiple different ways rather than just a single creature card or the like?
In general with Doctor Who, we tried to “go wide” on references instead of referencing the same thing over and over. It just gives a higher chance you find something from your favorite episode. That said, when it comes to some particularly iconic episodes and especially villains, we wanted to break that rule to give them the attention they deserve. So there are many Daleks, Cybermen, and yes, of course, Weeping Angels. Now, there’s only one actual Weeping Angel creature card in the set – but there are other cards that depict them – like some of the ones you are showing today!
Any concerns about printing thousands of new images of angels, all of which will now become angels themselves?
It’s a risk we were willing to take. Sorry in advance.
Understanding that the new saga cards represent episodes from the show, was it painful to make a card called Blink that doesn’t “blink” in the way Magic players might expect?
We talked about this for a very long time. We even started with Weeping Angels blinking out creatures, meaning you exile them and then return them, but ran into two problems.
The first was that that didn’t feel like the Angels. The Angels zap you back in time, and your chance of coming back is extremely low. It can happen but you’ll need some time travel shenanigans. A guaranteed blink that brings you back at the end of turn didn’t make sense.
Second, the whole catchphrase around the Angels is DON’T BLINK. It felt a little odd to then… blink something.
We thought we could get this Blink joke somewhere else. Like, for example, on Don’t Blink!
To that end, the card Don’t Blink seems like the absolute perfect mash-up of Magic and Doctor Who flavor. How did that card come about?
Yes, indeed! This card has kind of a funny story.
Originally, this was a split card: Don’t // Blink. Don’t countered a spell, and Blink blinked a creature. Cute, right? But do you see the problem?
It’s this: each half of a split card is its own separate card name, and once we decided we were going to do a saga called Blink, we couldn’t have two cards both named Blink!
So I started thinking about solutions. And realized there might be something even better here: a card that explicitly punishes blinking! That would be quite clever. It also works pretty well in the environment because the Paradox Power deck and Timey-Wimey deck both do a lot of bringing in from exile. Once I happened upon that, it became the clear winner.
A card like Gallifrey Falls No More also strikes me as a beautiful fusion of Magic mechanics and the flavor of the source material. When you explore older mechanics like Fuse for one-off Commander cards like this, do you go looking for an idea to fit a mechanic you know you want to use, or did this just seem like the right fit for a moment you knew you wanted to depict?
Right on, I love this card! If you don’t know the moment from the 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor, there’s debate over this painting as to if it’s called No More or Gallifrey Falls. But at the end of the episode, they realize it’s actually called Gallifrey Falls No More. It’s such a beautiful representation of this moment, with two halves you get to bring together using the fuse mechanic.
A lot of returning mechanics in Universes Beyond is about things that fit the flavor super well. A specific word or ability that just gets at the essence of what is going on. For example, we’ve seen The Foretold Soldier who has Foretell – a perfect name connection – and this fusing so you do both at once is just delightful.
We’ve seen the occasional Commander/Universes Beyond card get tried out in Magic’s Legacy format recently, stuff like Forth Eorlingas! from The Lord of the Rings and Triumph of Saint Katherine from Warhammer 40,000. I know you design these cards with that in mind, so do you see it as a “miss” when one performs super well in 1v1 Constructed, or is it just a natural part of how those formats evolve now? Any cards already on your radar from these decks?
We try not to make cards in these decks that hit competitive eternal formats, and actually have some passes aimed at catching them. It’s not the end of the world if a card does hit (especially if it’s a more reactive card: reactive cards are generally safer than threats in eternal formats), and when you make nearly 200 new cards you expect some will at least intrigue Legacy players. That said, we’d rather aim to have them not see play in Legacy and hopefully it ends up cool if a couple break through to see some light play. What we really want to avoid is another card like True-Name Nemesis, which is both unfun in one-on-one play and becomes extremely popular in the format. Forth Eorlingas! And Triumph of Saint Katherine are both much more reasonable than True-Name was in its era.
Thanks for having me today, and I hope you enjoy all the hard work we put into these decks! Allons-y!
Tom Marks is IGN’s Senior Reviews Editor. He loves puzzles, platformers, puzzle-platformers, and Magic: the Gathering. You can follow him on Twitter @TomRMarks.
