As we found out last year, Magic: The Gathering is getting a crossover with the classic British sci-fi show Doctor Who. Featuring characters and creatures from across the TV show’s 60-year history, MTG Doctor Who is sure to pack in tons of references to both classic and NuWho, giving a whole lot of famous faces and alien races the Magic card treatment.
This is the second major MTG Universes Beyond crossover release of the year, with the even larger MTG Lord of the Rings set coming out a season before. But MTG Doctor Who looks like it’ll be more akin to the MTG Warhammer 40k deck releases that came out last year, with Commander decks and Secret Lairs, but no standalone set accompanying them.
Details are thin on the ground right now, but here’s everything we know about MTG Doctor Who at this moment. And be sure to check out our 2023 MTG release schedule, for a better understanding of the time stream this year. Perhaps you plan to jump to a particular release date in your TARDIS.
MTG Doctor Who release date speculation
Right now we don’t exactly know when in time and space the MTG Doctor Who decks will be arriving. No concrete release date has snuck its way out of Wizards of the Coast HQ just yet, though we do have a general release window to consider.
MTG Doctor Who is confirmed for Q4 2023, so it’ll be here in either October, November, or December. It’s scheduled to release before The Lost Caverns of Ixalan, which we know has roughly the same release date as 2022’s The Brothers’ War. That came out on November 18, so chances are good we’ll see an October release date for Doctor Who.
That said, it’s possible Wizards will want to time the release to coincide with the TV show, and Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who specials, which air November 2023.
MTG Doctor Who details
A mixture of reprints with a Doctor Who theme and brand new Doctor Who cards are expected for the MTG Doctor Who crossover. Wizards has four Commander decks planned, and promises to fill them with “doctors, companions, villains, locations and more” from the show’s entire history. There’ll also be collector boosters, containing special treatment versions of these cards, and MTG Secret Lairs too.
It’s not easy to guess how Doctor Who will be divided across these four decks. For the last big crossover, it was fairly straightforward, there was one deck each for four of the Warhammer 40k factions – but many of Doctor Who’s most famous baddies are standalone. Perhaps the daleks and cybermen have enough built-up lore to create entire decks, and perhaps there’ll be a more general ‘monster’ deck, full of creatures that don’t play nice with others.
There’s far more material to go off for the heroes – 14 doctors and their companions for starters. So we wonder if Wizards might choose to split the goodies up a bit, perhaps sticking new content and old in separate decks.
MTG Doctor Who cards
We’ve glimpsed a few Doctor Who cards already, such as a Plains MTG land card featuring the TARDIS. This seems to hint at a somewhat predictable white colour identity for the heroes deck, and a reprint of the blue-white card Fractured Identity featuring the fourth doctor seems to add blue into the mix.
As for new cards, we’ve seen artwork for cards named Gallifrey Stands, The Fugitive Doctor, and The Eleventh Doctor. That’s five cards so far in total, and not one of them slots into a monsters or aliens EDH deck. Perhaps Wizards doesn’t want to give away too much at once, or perhaps this lends weight to the idea of multiple doctors decks?
