The Ninth Doctor Commander Deck Guide

The Ninth Doctor | Illustration by Colin Boyer

Many Doctor Who fans have mixed opinions on Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor. As far as I’m concerned, The Ninth Doctor is the most important reincarnation of The Doctor that we’ve ever seen. Given the show was canceled in 1989, bringing it back in 2005 had risks, but Eccleston’s performance was instrumental in keeping the show going.

The Ninth Doctor has such a unique ability that makes it perfect to build a Commander deck around it, so I’m ecstatic to do so.

The Deck

Clara Oswald | Illustration by Marta Nael

The Commander

The Ninth Doctor’s ability allows you to take additional upkeep steps. This is something you can certainly take advantage of if you build around it correctly. The first thing you need to decide is what colors your deck will be. Thanks to all the Doctors’ companions that were printed, you can pick any third color to add to your deck.

On top of that, if you’re building the deck specifically around this triggered ability, there’s one correct choice for your companion: Clara Oswald. Doubling your key triggered ability allows you to essentially double the effectiveness of your deck’s interactions, which is something you’re obviously interested in doing. Clara can also be any third color you like. For this deck, I’ll be choosing white.

Upkeep Triggers

This is the key to this deck. The easiest way to use The Ninth Doctor’s extra upkeep steps is to simply play cards that trigger during each upkeep. If you get extra upkeep steps, you in turn get extra triggers. It’s as simple as that. The first exciting card I came across when researching this deck is a terrible bulk rare from Return to Ravnica: Azor's Elocutors.

Elocutors is a weird card that is generally too difficult to make work. It has to survive for five upkeeps while you take no damage. Or six upkeeps and you only get damaged once. That’s atrociously bad. But wait, if you’re getting several upkeeps per turn, then this becomes much easier to manage. If you have Nine + Clara in play, you get three upkeeps each turn. A single Time Warp with this setup gives you six upkeeps and you’ll win on the spot.

There are two more cards here to give you extra upkeep steps. Paradox Haze just straight up gives you an extra upkeep step each turn, which is precisely what you should be looking for. But there’s one card that’s even more powerful. Sphinx of the Second Sun gives you an entire second beginning phase, which in turn allows The Ninth Doctor to trigger again, giving you a whole new set of upkeep steps. Between these two cards and your commanders, you’re aiming to get a lot of upkeep steps each turn. From there, how can you use those steps?

There are quite a few cards with uniquely powerful upkeep triggers. Starting with a card that grows stronger with each upkeep step, you have Mirror-Sigil Sergeant. Each copy of the sergeant has its same upkeep trigger, meaning you literally get exponentially more of them with each upkeep, quickly giving you a board that must be dealt with. You have a couple more powerful token generators, like Dragonmaster Outcast and Assemble the Legion. A particularly nasty card to have out is Extravagant Replication, which lets you keep making copies of all these permanents, increasing the number of triggers you get each upkeep.

In addition to these, you have a variety of powerful effects to draw upon. Raka Sanctuary and Court of Ire help you to kill creatures. Thassa, God of the Sea and Search for Azcanta give you some cheap spells that help filter your early draws until you get yourself set up. Plargg and Nassari gives you free spells every upkeep, meaning you’ll sometimes cast as many as six free spells before even hitting your draw step.

Finally, the most expensive spell in your deck is Portal to Phyrexia. It’s extremely powerful in Commander, as its enters the battlefield trigger applies to each of your opponents, but then you get to reanimate several creatures each turn. I can’t imagine you’d lose many games after getting that going.

Suspend Matters

The Timey-Wimey deck was built around suspend and vanishing anyway. With your extra upkeeps, you can definitely use some good suspend cards. The better cards like Ancestral Vision and Wheel of Fate are right at home here, but you can also make use of the underappreciated Sol Talisman, since you have quite a few expensive spells. When you have extra upkeeps, these cards come off suspend much faster and become far closer to their Power Nine counterparts. In addition, As Foretold helps make these cards even better while also being a very valuable card when you get to add time counters multiple times each turn.

You also have access to a set of cards that seem uniquely suited to this deck. Rousing Refrain and Inspiring Refrain suspend themselves as they resolve and recast after three turns. Except that if you have three upkeeps each turn, they’ll recast themselves each turn. These cards already look quite strong, but this adds so much to them that you have to play them. Even better than that though, they were styled off of a bunch of cards from Future Sight that did the same thing. Most of them are quite weak, but one looks exceptional: Chronomantic Escape. If you get this going, it can stop all your opponents from attacking you ever again. They’ll need to disrupt your board or counter this spell at some point, which is not necessarily going to happen in a Commander game.

While you like these suspend cards because of their synergy with your additional upkeeps, this does also make the new time travel mechanic quite desirable. You don’t have much room for these cards, but it does mean that The Tenth Doctor should be very good for you, as well as The Ninth Doctor’s personal saga, The Parting of the Ways. All these suspend synergies also give you reason to want Jhoira of the Ghitu and The Eleventh Doctor, helping you to power out any card you wish in a matter of just a few turns.

The Initiative

One of the best upkeep triggers around is the initiative. Since it was originally designed with multiplayer games in mind, it only seems fair that you make use of it here. White Plume Adventurer, Caves of Chaos Adventurer and Tomb of Horrors Adventurer are all great options which should add a lot of value to your deck.

The Undercity has five levels to it, meaning a single turn with several upkeeps sometimes lets you clear a dungeon in one go. Given that the first one you play starts you off by fixing your mana, you can’t really go wrong with them, and the ceiling of getting to turbo through The Undercity at will pushes these well over the top.

Tapping Effects

Ah… it appears I’ve forgotten to mention something. The Ninth Doctor only gives you an extra upkeep step if you untap it during your untap step. Fortunately, it has haste, allowing you to attack with it straight away, but attacking isn’t the most reliable thing in the world. After all, as only a 2/4 creature, it’s very likely that it won’t survive the combat. You need some good ways to get Nine tapped. The TARDIS is the perfect way of doing this, since a vehicle can be crewed whenever you like, even if you don’t need to attack with it. Plus, it’s obviously thematic for the deck. Since this piece is so important, you can also run The First Doctor to give you an extra way of getting it into your hand.

On top of that, you have a few novel ways of getting The Doctor tapped. Smuggler's Copter is another cheap and powerful vehicle. Holdout Settlement and Survivors' Encampment are fairly weak lands, but ones that can tap The Doctor without any mana spent to do so. A novel idea for this is to use Wand of the Worldsoul to give spells convoke, which also helps you to cast more expensive spells further down the line.

You could also make The Doctor unblockable, which handily enough is an ability that the trusty Sonic Screwdriver can do. It’s also a mana rock and you definitely want a few of those anyway. You can also use Access Tunnel and Rogue's Passage for this, along with Thassa, God of the Sea and The Eleventh Doctor, which you already wanted in the deck for other reasons.

Interaction

All good Magic decks need some amount of interaction. I’ve included a few simple removal spells like Rip Apart and Vandalblast, as well as the classic board wipe Blasphemous Act. The new all-purpose sweeper Everything Comes to Dust should also be a good nuclear option, should you need it.

You also need to be able to protect your board from enemy interaction, making staples like Flawless Maneuver and Teferi's Protection extremely valuable. You can also make use of my favorite Doctor Who card: Gallifrey Falls / No More, which doubles up as a sweeper and/or a protection spell for your board. Given that you also have some upkeep triggers that interact with the board, this should do for now, but this section is always something I’d want to keep an eye on and add more to when needed.

The Mana Base

I have tried to keep the mana base for this deck as simple as possible. Plenty of dual lands and all the possible Jeskai tri-lands: Command Tower, Path of Ancestry, Raugrin Triome, and Mystic Monastery. Much of this mana base should be easy enough to pick up, and I have kept it budget friendly, excluding things like shock lands, fetch lands, and original duals.

In addition, you have the initiative cards mentioned earlier to help fix your colors. All three talismans plus the obvious Sol Ring and Arcane Signet should give you enough cheap, early ramp. On top of that, Replicating Ring and Rotating Fireplace are slightly more off-curve but work incredibly well with the themes of the deck, making them impossible to ignore.

The Strategy

At this point in time, this deck is still a work in progress. The way I see it, the strategy is likely to use the early turns of the game to set up a board of various upkeep triggers, depending on what you have access to. Once you have a couple of good triggers available, then you want to deploy The Doctor, followed by Clara on a later turn. Hopefully, this play pattern allows you to make the most out of your various triggers. If you don’t have anything on the board, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to play The Doctor at all, so you should probably prioritize the board and then get your commander(s) out later.

Combos and Interactions

We’ve already discussed many of the specific interactions in the deck. There’s cards that give you additional upkeep steps: The Ninth Doctor, Clara Oswald, Paradox Haze, and Sphinx of the Second Sun. At the start of your turn, you untap The Doctor, triggering it to give you one more upkeep, plus Paradox Haze gives you another. Clara doubles The Doctor’s trigger, giving you another upkeep, so that’s a total of four.

Then, Sphinx of the Second Sun can give you a whole new beginning phase, in which you untap The Doctor to get an additional upkeep step and Clara doubles this for another one. All this gives you seven total upkeeps. Of course, you have to find the cards first, so it’s much more likely to only get to three per turn, since The Doctor and Clara are your commanders, but it’s nice to dream.

Rule 0 Violations

While I certainly might have missed something, I don’t believe this deck violates any rule 0 discussions that you may have with your playgroups. I have stayed away from cards that usually do this, like the faster mana rocks and cards that create easy infinite combos.

Budget Options

I’ve already done my best to keep this deck relatively budget friendly. I have omitted several more expensive Commander “staples”, including original duals and fetches, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Smothering Tithe, Rhystic Study, Dockside Extortionist, and so on.

In addition, I’ve made a conscious effort to include a lot of cards found in the Timey-Wimey precon deck, which means you can build this by taking that deck and upgrading it further. Some pricier cards in the deck like Teferi's Protection and Expropriate can also be easily replaced by cheaper cards that do similar things, like Unbreakable Formation and Time Stretch.

Other Builds

The most obvious way in which you can change this deck up is by changing its colors. You can be any combination out of Jeskai, Grixis, or Temur. You don’t even need to change the choice of companion since Clara can be whatever color you want. There are some strong options available in these other color combinations too.

A particularly exciting card is the Transformers card Cyclonus, the Saboteur, the vehicle side of which gives another way to get an additional beginning phase, which is perhaps the most broken ability for your deck. Conversely, green gives you access to a lot more token generators, like Awakening Zone or From Beyond. I’m sure there are some other ways to build this deck and you could definitely give these other colors a go.

Commanding Conclusion

The Eleventh Doctor | Illustration by Justyna Dura

Like I said at the start, I loved Christopher Eccleston in Doctor Who and I will be building this deck for myself. It looks so sweet to play and I hope it’s given you an idea of a unique style of deck that you can build with these new cards too.

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