The Master, Multiplied Commander Deck Guide

Last updated on March 22, 2024

The Master, Multiplied | Illustration by Lie Setiawan

One of Doctor Who’s biggest villains is The Master. The Master is a rogue time lord who grew up alongside The Doctor on Gallifrey, but ended up becoming insane. The Master has had many regenerations over the show’s run, much like The Doctor themself. The Master, Multiplied represents the version of The Master played by British acting legend John Simm.

He was an adversary of David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor. He had escaped the time war by hiding himself at the end of time and disguising himself as a human. Here, we see The Master, played by another legendary actor, Derek Jacobi, killed by his lab assistant and forced to regenerate into the younger John Simm. He steals The Doctor’s TARDIS and heads back to Earth to wreak havoc.

I’ve built a sweet new Commander deck around this new card, and today I’m going to tell you all about it.

The Deck

Wire Surgeons | Illustration by Josu Hernaiz

The Commander

This card represents John Simm’s Master in The Tenth Doctor’s final episode, where his plan involves supplanting himself onto every human on the planet, turning them all into clones of himself. It’s therefore fitting that this card makes copies of itself, using the myriad mechanic.

Even better than that, The Master makes for an excellent myriad matters Commander. It prevents your cards from forcing you to exile or sacrifice tokens, which means that you don’t have to get rid of the tokens that you “temporarily” create. On top of that, red especially has a variety of cards that make tokens that are sacrificed in the end step, and now there’s a Commander that lets you keep those tokens around. This deck is very much focused on getting The Master in play and creating as many tokens as possible.

Artifact Creatures

The first thing I looked at when building this deck is what other myriad cards we have access to. Sadly, there’s very little. Only 22 cards in the game have this mechanic and only half of them fit into this color identity. Not to mention, some of them, like Tiamat's Fanatics, are just plain weak.

However, one of the other new Doctor Who cards really stands out: Cybermen Squadron. Granting myriad to other creatures is a huge bonus, which makes this ability one that’s worth building around to some extent. As you’ll notice, there are a few other artifact creatures for this to work with sprinkled throughout the deck. On top of that, since you have a lot of cards that create token copies of your creatures, token copies of Cybermen Squadron all give myriad to each other, making for some truly ridiculous board states. Similarly, you of course have to run Blade of Selves, which in combination with this gets even more out of hand.

Encore's another mechanic that works really nicely with the ability to keep temporary tokens around. Wire Surgeons grants encore to other cards, even just artifact creatures, which is a really strong ability. Imagine giving encore to Cybermen Squadron. You’d create three copies of it, each of them having three instances of myriad. When you attack, they’d each create six token copies of themselves (assuming for a 4-player game), giving you a total of 21 copies. Each one with 21 instances of myriad. With The Master out, you keep every single one of these tokens, so when you attack next turn… I don’t even want to figure out how many tokens you end up with. Probably quite a lot. Point is, this card is incredibly synergistic with this deck, and it makes me want to build around it to some extent.

Both cards are incredibly powerful, and some of the best fits for this deck’s theme. But they both only work with artifact creatures. It turns out, most of the remaining cards aren’t artifacts, which creates a problem. Like all good problems, there’s a solution: Biotransference. You could also run Mycosynth Lattice for redundancy, but I’m just sticking to this one for now. Biotransference extends the range of these powerful abilities to every creature in this deck, but it also lets you get a bunch of free artifact creature tokens at no extra cost. It really brings this part of your strategy together nicely.

It hasn’t escaped my notice that these are only three cards in a 99-card deck and the odds of finding them is pretty low, let alone finding them together. For this exact reason, I’ve included a few general use tutors: Vampiric Tutor, Demonic Tutor, and Beseech the Mirror. I know some people don’t like using these cards, which I’ll talk about later, but I felt it was needed for this deck to function a lot more efficiently, given how crucial these cards are.

Temporary Tokens

The key to this deck is to create temporary tokens that would normally be sacrificed or exiled, but The Master prevents that from happening. Perhaps the most famous cards to use this ability would be Splinter Twin and Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker (and by extension, Fable of the Mirror-Breaker). These make it trivially easy to make a temporary copy of something that The Master then lets you keep.

This deck features a lot of effects like this, which don’t get as much love since they’re harder to form Modern-breaking infinite combos with. Creatures like Delina, Wild Mage and Orthion, Hero of Lavabrink are perfect for what you’re trying to do. You also have some enchantments that can sit around and give you free creatures whenever you want, like Flameshadow Conjuring and Determined Iteration. My favorite is perhaps Mirror March, which feels appropriately wacky and fun for any Commander table thanks to its inherent randomness.

Perhaps secretly the most powerful effect that you have access to for this is Red Sun's Twilight. You’d have already been interested in By Force, but the ability to permanently steal your opponents’ artifacts is too good to pass up on.

Additional Combat Phases

Something that synergizes incredibly well with myriad in particular is the ability to take an additional combat phase. The right effect causes your creatures to untap, including your myriad tokens, then get an attack in, where each copy then creates more of itself, presenting an increasingly dangerous and messy board state. I’ve opted for three cards that do this, and they’re all creatures, so you can then do even more shenanigans with creating copies of them. They’re Combat Celebrant, Port Razer, and Karlach, Fury of Avernus, though I think a lot of other cards in this general sphere have the potential to work.

Not that The Master must be on board for myriad tokens to carry over into the next combat phase, since myriad copies exile at the end of whatever combat step they were created in.

Enters the Battlefield Triggers

If you’re creating copies of your creatures, of course the most obvious thing to do is to run creatures with good enters the battlefield triggers. This lets you easily double up on those triggers turn after turn.

Starting at the bottom of the mana curve, you have a few cheap creatures that’ll help with your mana situation. Dockside Extortionist is a well-known Commander staple that would just be too powerful not to run, but Charming Scoundrel and Kalain, Reclusive Painter also seem like they’ll help out a lot. Similarly, Skittering Surveyor and Pilgrim's Eye help to keep your land drops flowing as you progress toward the 6 mana needed to play The Master.

Later in the mana curve, there’s some extremely powerful effects. Dalek Drone was too perfect and on theme not to run in this slot, but I liked it so much that Noxious Gearhulk also seemed appropriate. It’s also worth noting that these are artifact creatures to synergize with Wire Surgeons and Cybermen Squadron.

While not an artifact creature, Massacre Wurm felt far too powerful too. Getting extra copies of this creature likely results in you Plague Winding your opponents while also hitting them for a ton of damage.

I considered Archon of Cruelty, but it seemed a little too expensive to run. I’m not entirely convinced that it’s not worth it, so this might be something to add later. The same could be true of Meteor Golem or Cityscape Leveler.

With so many creatures entering the battlefield, Terror of the Peaks felt like a perfect fit. Not only is the ability to kill creatures whenever other creatures enter extremely powerful, but creating token copies of this card makes it the biggest threat on the board extremely quickly. On a similar note, I’ve also included Purphoros, God of the Forge for a bit of extra damage here and there.

Interaction

Being black and red, you can interact, but not with a lot of stuff. I’ve included general use cards like Bedevil and Blasphemous Act, and you have a few nice ETB triggers that let you interact with the board. You also have a pretty interesting board wipe in Invasion of Fiora. A lot of your most important creatures are legendary, so having a sweeper that lets you keep those legends around but also kill everything when you need to seems pretty useful. Not to mention that you can transform it into Marchesa, Resolute Monarch every now and then.

The Mana Base

Your mana base is fairly simple. You have the usual assortment of mana rocks, and thanks to being just two colors, you can run a nice big pile of dual lands without needing to worry too much. I don’t like running Mana Crypt and Mana Vault because not a lot of people can afford them and the only thing they do for the deck is make it faster. I extend that feeling to Jeweled Lotus too, since it would be perfect here.

The Strategy

Your objective in every game is to get to 6 mana and cast The Master, Multiplied as early as possible, so I’ve added a little extra mana acceleration to help you get there. A nice addition is Hellkite Courser, which let you cheat The Master into play while also giving it haste, another important piece of the puzzle. Without this, you’d have to use a card like Lightning Greaves or Swiftfoot Boots, which you’re of course running, but other options are always a plus.

Once you get one attack in with your commander and create some token copies, the only thing likely to get rid of them is a board wipe. Until that wrath comes, you can use these tokens to begin propagating our board and fill it up with tokens.

Budget Options

While I have made some of my usual budgetary considerations, this deck features quite a few expensive cards. Mostly it’s the tutors, Dockside Extortionist and Terror of the Peaks. These are all very powerful but not intrinsically necessary for the deck to function as a whole. In place of tutors, there are good draw spells that can be run, which while not as good at finding key combo pieces, still help to bring the deck together. There are also a few pricey lands like Blood Crypt and Bloodstained Mire, but as I’m sure you know by now, these aren’t necessary in the slightest and you can run whatever lands you have access to.

Combos and Interactions

There’s one big combo that this deck has access to. With The Master allowing you to keep your tokens around, token copies of Port Razer and Combat Celebrant start to look pretty scary. You can take infinite combat phases if you have Biotransference and Cybermen Squadron out, giving them Myriad along with all of their token copies. That said, this is a lot of moving parts, and I don’t see it coming together very often.

As I mentioned earlier, Splinter Twin and Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker are perhaps most well-known for how they’ve broken Modern in the past, with the former still being banned (and rightfully so) in the format. If you can make a token copy of something that untaps the original, or the Kiki-Jiki, you can create infinite hasty tokens. I don’t believe there’s a way for you to do that in this deck, though Zealous Conscripts would be the easiest inclusion if you wanted to add this combo into your own version.

Rule 0 Violations

This deck does violate Rule 0 a little bit, mainly due to its use of tutor cards. This is something you should likely make aware of to your playgroup. It does have an infinite combo that I’m aware of, but as it takes three specific cards to make work, I doubt it’ll come up very often.

Other Builds

To me, this feels like a very natural way to build a deck for The Master, Multiplied. One route you could go down is to focus a lot more on the artifact creature theme, especially thanks to the Necron cards out of the Warhammer 40K Commander decks. The deck has a lot of cards that synergize well here, particularly with the Wire Surgeons and Cybermen Squadron. Another route could be to get really aggressive and ignore most of the token synergies in favor of beating down your opponents as quickly as possible. Cards like Mishra, Claimed by Gix and Phyrexian Dragon Engine would probably be right at home in a deck like that and still play well with the myriad theme.

Commanding Conclusion

Command Tower | Illustration by Muhammad Firdaus

As soon as I saw this card spoiled, I knew I wanted to try building a deck like this. Especially because I absolutely love the character it’s based on, with every actor playing him giving a truly memorable and unique performance each time. It’s still a work in progress, and if you have any constructive feedback I’d love to hear it.

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Until next time, take care of yourselves!