MTG Universes Beyond: Doctor Who wants players to ‘make their own episode’ 

In designing MTG Universes Beyond: Doctor Who, the team at Wizards took a deep dive into what makes the show so beloved by its fans.

Doctor Who is one of the most long-running and prolific stories in all of fiction. Fans of the show’s Classic era grew up with Doctors and Daleks and ended up starring in and working on the show’s revival years. Doctor Who has a way of staying with you, long after you first fell in love with it.

With close to 1,000 episodes across its decades-long life, Doctor Who has an unparalleled amount of material to draw from. The Universes Beyond: Doctor Who team knows it too. Their goal for the set was to truly immerse players in the world of Doctor Who, reliving and remixing iconic parts of the show’s history.

MTG Universes Beyond: Doctor Who design and storytelling

BBC/WOTC

During a recent press Q&A, Universes Beyond: Doctor Who lead designer Gavin Verhey revealed that the internal tagline for the set during development was ‘make your own episode’. 

With characters, creatures, and settings pulled from the whole breadth of Doctor Who, players can create unique stories, setpieces, and confrontations that may as well have leaped right out of the screen.

‘We wanted those iconic moments’ Verhey went on to say. This is something that the Commander Decks have in spades. One of Universes Beyond: Doctor Who’s greatest strengths is managing to capture specific, beloved moments of the show in a single card or image.

From Reverse the Polarity providing a power/toughness switch to Everybody Lives giving blanket protection for a turn, the storytelling and card design of Universes Beyond: Doctor Who go hand in hand.

Fitting all of Doctor Who into one MTG set was a struggle

Shows and settings

With such an abundance of material to work with, the set’s designers had some difficult decisions to make. During the recent press Q&A, Verhey admitted that if they were to draw inspiration from all across Doctor Who’s extended media universe, they’d end up with far too many cards to design.

The Universes Beyond set’s tight focus on the Doctor Who TV show isn’t a slight on other forms of Doctor Who media. It’s simply a matter of practicality and working with the material that the largest percentage of the audience will be familiar with. 

Still, Verhey and the team worked to fit as much Doctor Who into the set as they reasonably could. If an iconic setting or moment wasn’t featured as part of the set’s regular cards, the design team attempted to get them in as Planes for the set’s Planechase component.

The God Complex is one such plane, an iconic episode from the Eleventh Doctor’s era, the labyrinthine hotel setting not quite finding a place in the set’s regular design space but being right at home in Planechase.

Eras and Doctors

The idea of identifying with the cards you’re playing is what shaped the direction that the team ultimately took the pre-cons in. Rather than making one deck per incarnation of the Doctor – which would naturally have left out a lot and led to a swathe of disappointed fans – the design team instead chose to group the decks by Era.

One deck for the classic Doctors, one each for two distinct eras of the revival show, and one showcasing all of the Doctor’s enemies and villains. 

Doctor Who’s fans each having a favorite regeneration – that idea of ‘my Doctor’ – was crucial to the development and how the decks were grouped into eras. Commander is a very personal format, with players constructing decks based on specific creatures, making it a perfect fit for Doctor Who.

Universes Beyond: Doctor Who is shaping up to be one of Magic: The Gathering’s most successful crossovers to date. Built with passion and laser focus, the set will have something to draw in any Doctor Who fan, young or old, and introduce MTG players to one of the most beloved shows of all time.