This could have been fun. If I'd started in 2015, think of all the nice, normal sets I could have reviewed. And in between, months of free time! But no, I waited to get into the game until the hellscape of 2023, where we get a new release every month and they all have more legendary creatures than stars in a clear western sky. Welcome to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. The ugly is compulsory.
This month we've got another massive drop of legends, this time from the Doctor Who universes beyond. I've seen a decent amount of the show, back during the SuperWhoLock craze. Liked it at first, then got bored. Hopefully the cards are more interesting. But, as always, I will try my utmost to be objective.
While there are fewer legends here than Lord of the Rings, there is an important wrinkle via another permutation of the Partner (Pard'ner for us cowboys) mechanic - Doctor's Companion. As such, there's really no reason to play a Doctor without a companion or vice versa, so it makes the most sense to group the Doctors and the Partners together, separate from the traditional legends. I'll be providing my top picks for each Doctor and Companion as well. Having looked ahead, I can say that the synergies are often not particularly strong, more evocative of the original partners than the commander legends partners. But there are a few potent pairings, including an infinite combo or two for you degenerates out there.
Oh, and one quick note - some of the cards reference planeswalking for the included planechase variant. I won't be factoring that into the gradings of the cards, partly because most people don't play the planechase variant, partly because I personally dislike it, and partly because it seems borderline impossible to assess the value of most of them. If you want to use these for planechase, you'll have to do your own evaluation.
Alright, shall we get started? Everyone whistle the theme song along with me - doo doo doo doo doooo do doooo do doooo…
Traditional Commanders
It does add a certain degree of panache to beat your opponents with some random lady dressed up in a maid outfit. Despite the sci-fi trappings, very ordinary-looking characters are going to be a bit of a running theme here, but Astrid seems especially homespun, making food which causes her to explore (never venture forth on an empty stomach, I guess). She's got a low enough cost and provides food quite efficiently, but food is a relatively low-value resource, and mono-white cuts off a lot of the food synergies that exist. She just doesn't do enough to imagine anyone using her except for the memes.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Perhaps appropriately for an old dude, Wilfred is slooooow. Many have opined that tap abilities are often too slow for modern commander, but Wilfred will frequently need at least a couple turns to warm up before he starts generating any value outside of being a Pillarfield Ox. The ceiling, ironically for a stargazer, is also fairly low, and he's easy to disrupt and hard to rebuild. Even proliferate, as cheaply as it can be had (though less so in mono-white) is going to be a slow way to get Wilfred off his feet. He might have been somewhat interesting as a companion, but on his own he's pretty rubbish.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Danny is one of those cards with an insane line of text that's heavily nerfed by his color identity. Blue is probably the worst color at going wide, AND among the worst at putting counters on its things. In white or green, Danny would be downright ugly, but the amount of work you'd need to do in blue is considerably greater. There is a recently spoiled card, Anduril, Narsil Reforged, that can do an extremely solid job of producing the counters, so with sufficient artifact tutors one might be able to focus on the go-wide aspect (perhaps spellslinging with Talrand and co?). But if it gets blown up, you might be screwed, and there are a lot of failure points for this strategy. Alternately, there are individual cards which provide their own counters, though they tend to be weak on their own. I don't think he's impossible to build, but I think by the time you've put in all the work, it will feel more like a hard day's work than a free ride.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
This is getting out of hand. As long as both Osgoods stay on the battlefield (and I don't see why they wouldn't) you get paid off for any flashback, retrace, cascade, impulse draw, madness, adventure, future sight, foretell, rebound, suspend, and other mechanics that don't come to mind. Unfortunately the payoff is somewhat middling, though Osgood does double up the clues, and does provide some mana to crack them. Still, I don't think it's enough to really feel like sufficient payoff, or sufficient reason to play mono-color, though I do find the design somewhat interesting.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Red has a lot more options to cast from non-hand than blue does, especially with impulse drawing. Throes of Chaos is particularly powerful. She's also a pretty solid body in her own right. All that said, I still have a hard time seeing her being quite powerful enough to justify placing in the CZ. I'm not confident that she can make enough tokens to become game-winning, and I think a lot of cast-from-not-hand stuff can become pretty wheel-spinny when you're impulse drawing into more impulse draw, and not really accomplishing much. I think one could make a pretty solid deck from her, but by the standards of 2023 I think she's more of a dark horse than a frontrunner.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Woof. Green human tribal is a tough sell, and I don't think Karvanista is nearly good enough to justify it. The adventure is interesting, but being sorcery-speed makes it hard to fully utilize, especially since green has limited options to exploit it yourself (o-stone and disk come to mind, but that's about it). I also don't love commanders that need to attack in order to buff your other creatures, since it kinda splits your goals between voltron and go-wide strategies, which is rarely a good idea. Bad dog.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
This seems shockingly terrible to me. A 3/3 first strike lifelink for 2 would be uninteresting even without the delay, but by the time it becomes available it can't even boast above-curve stats. Of course, it does come partnered with Amy Pond, who is significantly more interesting, but she can also parnter with any of the fifteen doctors, so she could certainly do better than Rory. Her ability isn't even particularly synergistic with him, since putting him into play during combat renders the suspend-haste, one of his few upsides, irrelevant. The clue token doesn't mean much to me, since I can't imagine synergizing around it. 2 for a draw one time is fine but it barely moves the needle for me.
Final Judgment: Extra Bad
Final Judgment: Extra Bad
Yeva, Nature's Herald and Raff Capashen, Ship's Mage both seem like an eternity ago. Looking at this card, it's objectively pretty decent compared to them - loses flash itself and has weaker stats, but adds a decent triggered ability - but playing any of them look like hard mode in 2023. And honestly, I really hate losing flash on the commander. Being able to hold up interaction only after you've resolved the commander seems a lot worse. And the trigger being once per turn AND pay to draw AND doesn't include herself seems like it becomes pretty weak and probably not worth building around to any great extent. I'm sure a decent deck could be built around her, but I think it's an uphill battle.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
I tried to look up whether this guy was the president of the USA for joke purposes, and the results were…inconclusive. What's more conclusive is that he is, at last, a solid-looking commander! Conspire isn't the easiest copying ability to pull off, especially since he doesn't want a deck cluttered with creatures, but he does provide a boost with casting from exile, plus free CA. I think the biggest difficulty here will be getting enough creatures into the deck - obviously token-making sorceries and such can do the job while keeping noncreature count high, but unless go-wide is the goal, they might become redundant after a point. And that's in addition to more cast-from-exile enablers. So there are a lot of moving parts here, and I suspect a lot of builds will have a difficult time without substantial time spent tweaking. But I do think he's an interesting design and worth the effort.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Relying on your opponents' decks is often a dicey proposition, and I don't think the Cyber-Controller has enough payoff to justify the risk. If a typical deck has roughly a third creatures, then in 4P you can expect to get one 2/2 for each mana spent on X. Which isn't awful, but it's really not that exciting as a commander. You could put a lot of ramp into the deck to hit a good number, but then your commander doesn't do much once he's in play, unless you want to bounce him back to hand and then do it all over again, which is very slow and expensive. You could play more artifact creatures, but a +1/+1 bonus isn't a terribly exciting payoff. None of this sounds particularly promising to me, so what about a different tact - flip the cybermen with Conjurer's Closet etc. More fun, definitely, but even more prone to variance, and it seems like you're probably better off with, say, Geth, Lord of the Vault if generating lots of mana and stealing enemy creatures is what you want. With Cyber-Controller, if you don't hit anything good on first whack, you're much shorter on options. There are a decent number of angles here, and probably some combination is ideal, but I don't think any of them can come together to make this package compelling.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
What a strange, interesting card. I'll admit I delayed in writing his review until after a couple decks went up on EDHrec in order to see what people came up with. As I see it, there are a few different angles to take: exiling a generally-strong creature in order to have it more consistently (say Hullbreaker Horror), retriggering powerful ETBs (say Sepulchral Primordial), exiling an evasive/protected creature for voltron purposes (say Invisible Stalker), or some sort of combo shenanigans. The combo that came to my mind was cycling between Undying and Persist creatures with a sac outlet, but EDHrec found the far simpler synergy with classic combo piece Palinchron, up to no good as usual. Of course, you could also do some mixture of all of these, although exiling so many of your own creatures might spread you a bit thin on the board. I'm not thrilled about the ease of the Palinchron combo, but overall I still think the design here is really interesting, and I'm excited to see what people do with the card - though outside of combo I'm dubious that he's legitimately powerful.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
First off, I do have to say that I dig this flavor. I don't know anything about this plot, but I completely understand his vibe based on the mechanics. To the strength of the card, as a skulk tribal commander he provides a pretty strong payoff, though skulk is a pretty rare ability. Go dredge up your Vampire Cutthroats. As far as his activated ability, it's a bit lacking on its own - to get your card, you need to have a target with low enough power, that can't exclude itself from combat with a tap/sac ability, and for that target to get through…and the end result is just decent. Plenty of 4mv commanders exist that can draw an extra card each turn, with much fewer hoops to jump through (though untaps could make this more exciting). Of course his power getting greater is cool flavor, and matters insofar as he can take larger creatures, but those become less and less likely to get through as skulk is less relevant on larger creatures.Relying on enemies having the right boards to exploit is potentially risky, but adding a complement of your own skulk creatures shores up this weakness. I don't think he's too terribly powerful, but the design sells this enough for me to give it a pass.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Apparently we can just run Satan as a commander now. Coolio. He doesn't really live up to the hype, though. Even if you do the work to finally untap him, a 6/6 for 4 with no keywords isn't so far above curve that it'll be exciting by that point in the game. Having a Threaten from the command zone is decent, but being compelled to use it T4 against "whatever happens to be lying around" is pretty weak. I'd rather wait until something actually interesting comes along, but then your CZ isn't doing anything until that point. Drawing a card when a stolen creature hits its controller is okay, but there aren't many permanent theft effects available in BR, and maybe-cycling Threatens doesn't seem very compelling. Threaten is an effect meant to close the game, not be your game plan for the long haul. Maybe if you drew two or three cards, but a single card isn't enough payoff to make this work.
Final Judgment: Bad (in a bad way).
Final Judgment: Bad (in a bad way).
I've waffled on this one a bit. I think the closest point of comparison is Sheoldred, Whispering One - they're both 7-drops that (potentially) make each opponent sacrifice a creature every turn cycle. But there's a glaring difference here - Sheoldred's not so much into giving the opponents a choice. That sounds like a massive downside for the emperor here - and there are some Villainous Choice commanders later who become significantly weaker for having given the opponent options - but in this case I think it might actually be upside. For one thing, Sheoldred is going to be a must-kill for any deck with a small number of very valuable creatures, such as a voltron deck or creatureless spell deck. With the emperor, they're a lot more able to allow you to exist, while feeding you free tokens. For a second thing, there's a tragedy of the commons effect here. In a 1v1 game, I would absolutely sacrifice a 2/2 to deny my opponent a 3/3 menace haste - that's a no-brainer. But in multiplayer, it's not nearly so obvious. If the 3/3 is coming at me, then yes, but if I don't think it is, or if I have good defenses and am confident it's going elsewhere, then I'm probably happy to let my opponent have a 3/3 and keep my board intact. As such, I think you'll end up making tokens the majority of the time, and that's a very fast board-builder in a 4p game. There are some drawbacks though - opponents with no creatures get to free-roll the sacrifice option, and once players start leaving the game his value trails off significantly. Still, I do think it's a fun design that makes good use of the Villainous Choice mechanic.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
It's quite convenient to go from a good example of Villainous Choice directly into a terrible one. The choice given here is much less painful - 4 life being relatively minor in commander, especially against a lifegain deck, which (should one be at the table) you likely will be forced to choose every time. And the design also means that you can't return the creatures via other means once the Master has tried to reanimate them - the best you're getting is a single token, or a single shot of 4 life. Even when you have a cooperative opponent, you can't reliably teamwork because someone else might have more life - you'll usually be forced to choose the worst possible option of your opponents, the one with the most life to burn. To top it off, you only get the bonus from artifact creatures, which significantly narrows your options. It doesn't take a Magic Master to see how this card will probably play out - you might get back some mediocre, small artifact creatures, but when it's really important, that's when he's going to let you down hard.
Final Judgment: Impressively bad
Final Judgment: Impressively bad
That is one unique line of rules text, right there. It's definitely not hard to imagine how this could fly out of control, even just by itself - first swing at everyone for 4, then 12, then 36 - it's a hell of a fast clock. But that's if you never lose him in combat, which is tricky with 3 toughness on a 6mv creature with a huge target on his head. Dolmen Gate is your best friend. But taking a step back, there are a ton of ways to exploit that ability besides just going wide with the commander. Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker, Feldon of the Third Path, Wake the Dead, Chandra, Flamecaller, Splinter Twin, Rionya, Fire Dancer, Mimic Vat, and of course all the other myriad creatures…there are a ton of possibilities, most of which involve making copies of creatures, which typically wants creatures worth copying. As such, I think most decks will want to either decide if they're trying to focus on keeping the commander alive as he multiplies, or focusing on copying other creatures while exploiting his abilities primarily in other ways. Either way seems viable, though the commander-focused version is certainly simpler to build. I do have some concern that there could be ways to break him, but he is a boltable 6-drop in bad protective colors so it can't get too bad. And there's no denying that the design is cool as hell.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Another stinker, which makes sense given that he looks like an egg. The stats are fine though wildly boring, and the vampiric trigger isn't particularly interesting either, so how about that activated? Well, it's terrible. Not being able to guarantee a priority target is bad enough, but being able to choose yourself is just…ouch. If you were hellbent on building this deck for some reason, you could include some creatures that enjoy taking damage and/or indestructibles, but honestly why bother? This guy is not worth the effort.
Final Judgment: He went bad (y'know, like an egg)
Final Judgment: He went bad (y'know, like an egg)
Just imagine showing this card to someone in 1994. They would have exploded. As bizarre as seeing some US(?) army dude on a magic card is, though, he's definitely no slouch. The easiest comparison is Xyris, the Writhing Storm, which has slightly beefier stats and a powerful triggered ability, but John costs 2 less and comes with haste, which are both massive deals. Xyris is a popular commander, and a lot of that popularity is tied to his snake-generating ability, however the same ability to politic while generating massive draws is still present - and might be an easier sell when you're not making snakes at the same time. Giving an opponent so much free CA could be risky, however using it judiciously should mitigate this. Personally I'd use him early in a cooperative fashion, getting permission to attack and racking up modest commander damage, then draw into powerful equipment/auras/etc with protective spells and finish the job in a single hit, so that they can't use the cards against me. But he's a powerful enough draw engine that I think he'll be good for any number of strategies. He scares me a little, to be honest.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Nominally an insect tribal commander, though I can't really imagine wanting to play many insects - more likely I'd just go with big ramp to get as many tokens as possible. That honestly sounds very boring and repetitive, so I don't think this commander will be terribly compelling even if it's perfectly functional. And it's not powerful enough to be of interest to the high-powered crowd. So I expect most people who build a deck for him will ditch it sooner rather than later.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
As with The Master, Formed Anew, I waited until last to do this review, hoping that EDHrec would discover her hidden potential, but unlike with the Master, EDHrec let me down. There are some extremely overcomplicated combos you can pull off - copy her ETB to exile two artifacts, one with an untap ability and one that taps for sufficient mana, and you can go infinite…but that's a 3-card combo with pretty specific pieces…which also needs summoning sickness to wear off…and often needs additional pieces to capitalize on the mana…so it seems extraordinarily bad. I don't understand why she has vanishing, which seems like a needless handicap. She can be used to retrigger artifact ETBs, but notably she does not create them herself (her copying their abilities is an ETB trigger, so it's too late to trigger them), so you only get the added ETB of the artifact re-entering after she leaves play. That's not to say there's absolutely nothing you could do with her - I'd rather build Idris than Astrid or Strax - but I think whatever she does manage to accomplish is going to be way overcomplicated and decidedly not worth the effort.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
I have to admit, this design is very aesthetic. The art, the abilities, it all flows together quite nicely and paints a nice picture, so to speak. Play them both out, swing them together, train Jenny, let Vastra kill something, then get some free cards, counters, and life for the next turn. Unfortunately, I think it's going to have a hard time coming together quite as nicely in an actual game. They don't play very well apart from each other, and 7 mana is a significant commitment, especially if they both die and need 11 mana to be recast. Getting Vastra a safe kill also sounds dicey, especially if people are paying attention to you. I suspect the dream of a swordfighting duo taking on all comers is a bit unlikely. Having played Virtus the Veiled and Gorm the Great at one point, rarely did things work out the way I wanted them to, and I think these two ask even more and play worse on their own. Cool design, but more of a challenge build than a dynamic duo.
Final Judgment: Dealer's Choice…I have to go bad
Final Judgment: Dealer's Choice…I have to go bad
River has two abilities of dubious usefulness. The first ability is extremely funky - drawing from the bottom of your deck (something you'd certainly get thrown through a window for, in an old western saloon - did you forget the framing device?). The most effective way I can think to utilize this strange effect is with the number of "put a card from your graveyard on bottom of your deck" abilities. This enables you to keep redrawing the same cards, which is most effectively exploited with time magic, my absolute favorite. The other ability could do some work on its own, especially against land ramp and the like, but probably not enough to be exciting. Perusing EDHrec, by far the most potent use of the card I've seen is with From the Ashes, enabling it to become 1-sided Ruination, or nearly so. We're seeing buyback-time-magic strats and build-your-own-Ruination…can you guess where this grade is headed?
Final Judgment: you guessed it, UGLY!
Final Judgment: you guessed it, UGLY!
Poor Jenny, if only you'd come out a few months ago, but unfortunately Kellan, the Fae-Blooded has filled the role of Boros double-strike commander. Of course, before him there was Eomer, King of Rohan, and before him Reyav, Master Smith, and before him Bruse Tarl, Boorish Herder, and before him Kalemne, Disciple of Iroas. That Kalemne is pretty similar, power-wise is pretty damning. The explore trigger is neat and all, but it's relatively small potatoes considering that a double-striking commander is going to kill people in just a few hits at most. Being somewhat self-contained as a value engine is nice, but it's not like Kellan needs many deck slots to flex some much more powerful synergy.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Really wish a private detective would be BW for that noir vibe. Having Maro as a commander is fine, and the investigate is somewhat nice though it still feels a bit underwhelming to me. He's on the cusp of being worthwhile, but not quite there. Unfortunately his activated ability doesn't do much to push that needle - besides the obvious only-once downside, being a tap ability means you're missing out on your clues if you want to keep it open, and of course it's completely telegraphed. Blinking him to reset it hardly seems worthwhile either, when you could just play removal instead. I think he fits into the same camp as Iraxxa - not bad, could be made into a solid deck, but not exactly impressive.
Final Judgment: Bad (just barely)
Final Judgment: Bad (just barely)
A grixis casualty commander - we've seen that before. Anhelo, the Painter is quite popular, and Ashad has a lot of similar things going for him. Applying casualty to artifacts seems promising - oftentimes extra instants/sorceries can be somewhat redundant (if there aren't good removal targets, the draw is excessive, etc), whereas having double the board presence is almost always good. Artifact creatures can casualty themselves, and imagine what he can do with mana rocks. That said, I'd take a 1/3 deathtouch over a 3/3 any day, the extra cost is a bummer, artifacts are harder to cast on enemy turns to get extra casualty activations, and the trigger to get extra counters seems like more of a distraction than anything. I don't think any of this means Ashad is bad, but I am dubious that he'll be quite as strong as Anhelo.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
As soon as I read the first line of text, I knew I wasn't going to like this card. That damn randomness *shakes fist* Caan is clearly the brains of the operation, as the rest of the triggers could be pretty unimpressive, but the real annoyance here is that you're trying to swing a mediocre-statted creature safely, which is going to need a decent amount of support. You could build around some of the abilities, but since they're random there's no way to guarantee that filling your deck with artifact creatures, for example, is going to pay off. Any single one of these abilities could have made a solid option, but I really think the randomness kills it.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Having played Sygg, River Cutthroat back in the day, Davros feels like an upgraded version of that. And from that experience, I can say that there are a lot of evasive 3-power 3-drops, which will have you pumping out 3/3s in no time. The ceiling isn't insane here, but considering he only costs 4 is quite solid if you can trigger him for each opponent by the midgame. Like with the Dalek Emperor, a risk is that your hellbent opponents can freely deny you your draw, but a hellbent opponent is generally an easy one to kill anyway. I think the ceiling stops Davros from becoming ugly, but he's definitely a nice little powerhouse.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Maybe I'm just not in the right headspace for this stuff, but why is some Mary Poppins-looking freak leading an army of confused robots? I find it very strange that Missy's first line of text doesn't say "nontoken". Possibly this is a new templating decision? Regardless, the ability is powerful, not least because it comes with 3 infinite sac combos - Dragon's Eye Savants, Ruthless Ripper, and Horde Ambusher. In fact, she's quite effective with many morph creatures, since she can continually retrigger them via a sac outlet. It seems excessive to me that it triggers for both enemy creatures and her own - I would have preferred one or the other. As far as her second ability goes, it's not so crazy - Davros is already doing a fairly similar thing at 4 mana, albeit with more work involved - but it feels like unnecessary icing on the cake considering how nuts her first ability is. Yes, she costs 6, she should be powerful, but it feels like too much going on to me.
Final Judgment: Ugly
Final Judgment: Ugly
Now this is a design I can get behind. Goading auras are good fun, and having a commander that creates them is awesome. Goading commanders can be risky since their death leaves you vulnerable, but the Rani leaving auras behind makes her much more resilient, and she doesn't miss a beat since she generates another one on ETB. I think investigate is a good amount of value as well - not too much, not too little. Worth noting that she doesn't need to put the aura on a creature of the defending player, so you can try to open players up with auras such that you can use them in the future to get free attacks and create even more auras. Goading fun for the whole family! As far as the deck, the design is somewhat open-ended - having a way to protect her while attacking is probably worthwhile, and there are artifacts and enchantments entering frequently enough to take advantage of those triggers, so there are a lot of directions to go.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
We've seen "take an extra vote" before on 3-drops, and those aren't good either. 2 votes isn't enough to outvote the rest of the table, and it's only a 20% boost to cards that care about the total number of votes. Additional Villainous Choices is much more compelling, but there are so few of those cards, and they're mostly doing disparate things. Trying to cobble together a sensible deck from the few decent synergy pieces available is not going to happen.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Oh boy, more GI Joes, now with conspicuous bulge action. Historic permanents are a pretty broad class of card, and the fact that many decent lands are legendary makes it significantly easier to hit large numbers for his buff. On the downside, 8 is a lot, it doesn't come with evasion, and a single token isn't necessarily enough to justify running random legends over efficient token creators. That said, there are plenty of strong legendaries and artifacts, and perhaps a few sagas, that I think you can largely freeroll the synergy here and get a pretty low-setup wincon pretty easily. Even with modest synergy, his buff will probably be in the double digits by the time you get to 8 mana, and that's definitely enough to be a threat even without evasion.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Pretty disappointed we're not seeing an Arya Stark card first. Me draws obvious comparisons to Skullbriar, the Walking Grave. Skullbriar has haste and costs much less, whereas Me has different/more colors, greater starting stats, generates her own counters without needing to connect, and comes with built-in recursion (which could also enable madness and the like). Personally I think they're both good in different ways - Skullbriar can undoubtedly come down more aggressively, and plays as more of a glass cannon since he needs to connect to give himself more counters, and doesn't natively circumvent tax so he's more vulnerable to disruption. Me can't get quick kills, but she plays defense better, and needs less support to be effective, leaving the deck more open for interaction. As far as the really valuable counters, black can generate an indestructible counter much more easily, whereas red can provide the coveted double strike counter, and they've both got hexproof counters available from green. Which you prefer depends on your playstyle, but they're both cool as hell.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Strangely similar to Alistair, Kate cares about something wildly different and significantly less practical. There are a small handful of mechanically dissimilar cards that involve time counters, plus a decent chunk of cards with vanishing. Unfortunately, cards with vanishing are pretty terrible on their own, however with time travel or proliferate they can become…still pretty terrible, actually, with the exception of a few of the new cards. To me, this looks like a very feast-or-famine commander - the whole deck is built around the commander, all the cards suck without it, she has to attack to get the buff, and if she gets disrupted the deck eats dirt faster than the Bagger 293 (look it up). That said, the payoffs could be completely insane - Contractual Safeguard to get time counters onto your tokens, then proliferate a couple more times, and things could get pretty out of hand. I'm sure Kate will win some games quite handily, but I suspect she'll be frustrating to play.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Let's do an experiment. Let's say that, instead of playing Boe fo' sho', you play some random 4mv mana dork that taps for 2, say Arixmethes, Slumbering Isle. How would those two compare? One of the most popular cards for Boe is Sol Talisman, an extra copy of sol ring allegedly. Except that you're tapping your 4-drop commander to cast it. If your commander was Arixmethes, you could play Worn Powerstone or Thran Dynamo instead, at effectively the same cost for powerstone, or slightly more for dynamo (though it taps for more). What about Ancestral Vision - Ancestral Recall is insane! But with Arixmethes, you could just play Thirst for Discovery or Manifold Insights or Secrets of the Golden City off Arixmethes. You might argue those cards are slightly worse than the suspend versions, but those can also be cast without the commander in play, including before playing the commander, plus Arixmethes can help cast, well, anything else. And Arixmethes also comes with a future 12/12 body, and he's just one of many other ramp commanders. Put into that light, there's really only a couple suspend cards that are legitimately interesting, with the biggest standout being Restore Balance. Could you build a deck around Restore Balance? Sure, but it's too inconsistent to be competitive, and too obnoxious to be casual. With that last vestige of hope extinguished, I don't see any way that Boe is worth building, at all.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Doctors
Relying on a non-commander card to do the thing your commander does is a bit dicey, but being able to search graveyard as well as library is a pretty significant upgrade to avoid getting bricked, especially when you're also in the best protective colors (though you may want some ways to blink the Doctor in case the TARDIS dies without him). The TARDIS is a reasonably efficient way to get cascade, the total package coming at similar costs as Abaddon, the Despoiler and Imoti, Celebrant of Bounty that also enable cascade. Splitting the cost does make it faster to set up without ramp. But unlike those other cards, he only provides a single cascade - a small loss early but could be pretty significant late as it puts a cap on the value you can get. You could run extra cascade cards for extra counters, but there are very few and most of them kinda suck so it's probably not worth it for a single counter. This also points to another problem, which is that UW doesn't have a lot of synergy for cascade, so the value is mostly from the cascaded spell itself, not additional bonuses (except for the single +1 counter). So this does feel a bit small-ball, but it's a reasonably self-contained package so it could be a decent support card for a strong companion. There aren't a lot of direct synergies within companions, except for Graham O'Brien who gives a food when you cascade, Adric, Mathematical Genius who provides an extra cascade (at a rather steep price admittedly), and Tegan Jovanka who protects the Tardis while it attacks - all fairly minor bonuses. But if you were building around the companion, you could, for example, use Leela, Savateem Warrior in a wheel deck, and then get extra value from the cascade, rather than relying primarily on the cascade for value.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
I'm always a fan of these sorts of effects - not only do they deter attacks, but they also give you fair warning for when you will be attacked. One downside here is that, since it triggers on endstep, you don't have as much ability to raise defenses in the event that someone does decide to declare war by rejecting your bribe, and you can't deploy a nasty planeswalker after everyone has agreed to leave it alone. As far as bribing with cards rather than counters, the extra value does mean people are slightly more likely to accept the bribe, but it's also a bigger risk, especially against decks that don't plan to win via combat. At least it's symmetrical, though, and you can relax the CA requirements of the deck accordingly. For best companions, Leela, Sevateem Warrior is the obvious choice, though it does dampen the effect of your commander since people may be less likely to accept your bribe when it's buffing your companion for a lethal strike. Similarly Vislor Tulough. Adric, Mathematical Genius and Clara Oswald both seem questionable considering the symmetry of the ability, though they provide extra incentive to declare peace. Susan Foreman is a decent vanilla choice that guarantees a T3 start to the bribery. But you could easily just build around the companion, and use the doctor as a standalone value/defensive piece, since the synergy is fairly minimal.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
I don't like this as a payoff for noncreature tokens. You get a big dumb beater, but only if you don't sacrifice them? That is way too much work for way too little. There are a decent number of companions that produce tokens under certain circumstances - Graham O'Brien, Ian Chesterton, Romana II, and Sarah Jane Smith are the best - but they all require their own buildaround. Romana II is probably the simplest fit for the Doctor if you want to commit to a straightforward noncreature token deck, though her cost hardly seems worthwhile just to generate an extra treasure or clue or food. Maybe more sensible is Dan Lewis, who gives you an extra reason not to sacrifice your tokens, while buffing up the Doctor significantly more and providing a good color for treasure generation. Sounds extremely janky, but it's probably the best you're going to get.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
I'm always a bit wary of effects that let you cast the top card of your library only if it matches a certain type - it always bricks more than you'd expect. Luckily in this case, since there are many strong legendary and artifact lands, the hit rate can be quite high, though you'll probably still need a decent number of non-historic fixing lands and probably some non-historic instants for interaction. Typically historic cards can't be cast on enemy turns, so having a way to give them flash is probably a high priority to increase the number of casts you can perform (though ofc you'll likely be bottlenecked by lands unless you have a way to change your topdeck, like Sensei's Divining Top - extremely strong here since it can also become a historic topdeck when your topdeck would otherwise be uncastable). With no extra value from the food, I don't think this Doctor looks too exciting - the amount of draw doesn't necessarily seem worth the effort. But he has a lot of potential synergy with companions - Sarah Jane Smith and Graham O'Brien provide extra tokens from your casts, or Jamie McCrimmon and Peri Brown go in different directions with historic casting. Sarah is probably the better choice, since she adds another color and has a more logical curve, though you'll still need to find something useful to do with the tokens. Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright provide saga buildarouds - for my money, Ian Chesterton is clearly superior. Finally, Nyssa of Traken and Ace, Fearless Rebel give you something worthwhile to do with the food tokens, which is possibly the best utility - though unfortunately they overlap in colors with the Doctor - or Dan Lewis adds red and some weaker utility. Which one you prefer depends on the direction you want for the deck, and which colors you want. I think Ace seems like the most logical build in a lot of ways - the Doctor gives you extra draw already, so getting even more stuff to spend mana on seems likely to result in a mana bottleneck, whereas Ace gives you a free outlet to turn the food resources into something useful - and I like her effect more than Jamie or Peri.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Compared to a lot of the other Doctors, the Fifth seems very straightforwardly powerful to me. Not attacking is a low bar for a lot of decks, and a global untap plus counters is a lot of value for a 4-drop, with very little buildaround necessary. The most obvious directions to go would be wide, for extra counters, or tap abilities for extra value on that axis. There are a handful of companions with tap abilities - Susan Foreman to ramp him out and generate extra mana on enemy turns, Yasmin Khan for extra draw, Romana II for extra tokens, Nardole, Resourceful Cyborg for extra mana (can't ramp the Doctor, but can produce a ton of mana eventually), and certainly not least, Adric, Mathematical Genius, who can casually go infinite with 3+ mana generation from mana dorks on-board. If Adric, or the Doctor, were green, that could easily border into ugly territory, but there are scant few dorks available in Azorius. You could animate mana rocks, if you're particularly committed to the combo, or just use Adric to generate extra counters for a wide board. Any of the companions seem quite strong to me, and he's strong enough on his own to be among the strongest of the Doctors.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
As I've mentioned, I like copying permanent spells quite a bit, so the ability here is some solid value. Copying sagas can be quite strong, and copying legendaries without the tag is even more exciting. Less exciting is the cost - if this was a standalone commander, I don't think anyone would pay him much mind. But the bar is a bit lower for these pseudo-partners. Companion-wise, Peri Brown makes a lot of sense to provide an extra color, ramp him out, and ramp out the spells you cast with him. Clara Oswald would be incredible, however to my understanding her ability cannot copy his own, unfortunately, because of the "once per turn" clause. There are a few artifact-focused companions, though I don't think they're synergistic enough. I could see a saga build with Ian Chesterton or Barbara Wright. I think the best option, though, is Romana II, who can create an additional copy of anything the Doctor copies (excepting legendary sorceries, of course), and can be untapped to do it even more.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
I'm glad WotC is creating commanders with guessing games involved - recently Gollum, Scheming Guide was the first, and was a lot of fun despite being terrible jank. I think the answer is likely to be easier to guess here, though - higher cost means more value, so why would you cast a small spell? Unless you're up to 6 artifacts or more, guessing over seems like the consistently safe bet. Overall I'm not thrilled about the value here, though - attacking with a 5mv 3/6 is a bit fraught, and the ceiling doesn't seem all that high. If you want to cast big spells, probably safer to just ramp normally rather than relying on this ability. So this is probably more fun than good. As far as companions, Tegan Jovanka or K-9, Mark I solve the attacking problem, Susan Foreman ameliorates the mv problem, Nyssa of Traken or Ace, Fearless Rebel give you something useful to do with your artifacts, and Adric, Mathematical Genius and Clara give you double value from the attack trigger. Nyssa is probably the strongest of those overall, but she doesn't add a color and has some tension with the Doctor's ability - though at least it means you can commit as hard as you like to the "make a bunch of artifacts" plan.
Final Judgment: Good (but more fun than good)
Final Judgment: Good (but more fun than good)
Based on the currently high price tag, I might be missing something here, but this guy seems imminently terrible to me. Both him and The Sixth Doctor provide an extra historic per turn, but the Eighth doesn't provide any extra tempo whereas the Sixth gives you the copy for free. Not to put too fine a point on it, but comparing this to Muldrotha, the Gravetide (at the same mana value!) is an absolute joke. He does have a lot of companion synergies - the TCC Professor highlighted Jo Grant, but that seems extremely mediocre to me. 3 mana cycling is a ton, and you gain very little at the end of the day - you mitigate the downside of the discard, meaning you paid 3 to draw a card and get a +1 counter, after putting 9 mana worth of commanders into play, and you don't even get a third color. This seems unacceptably bad. Jamie McCrimmon seems at least a bit more sensible, even if I don't think he's a very good card overall. Probably the best choice is Ian Chesterton with the saga buildaround, though I don't think any build can really salvage this guy.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
This Doctor is a real wildcard - none of the companions have any upkeep triggers, so outside Clara Oswald and Adric, Mathematical Genius there's not much synergy to be had (or, I suppose, K-9, Mark I and Tegan Jovanka to enable his attacks, but all of this feels pretty minor). That said, his ability is potentially quite potent for a mere 3-drop. There are tons of powerful upkeep triggers, and doubling them at such a low cost is a big game. The deck should mostly build itself - once you have a companion to lock in the color (Clara probably makes the most sense and keeps you flexible), just chuck in all the most powerful upkeep triggers you can find. You also probably want a way to get him tapped - vehicles are easy, though the cheapest enablers are Holdout Settlement/Survivor's Encampment.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
The question looming over the tenth doctor is "why wouldn't you just play Jhoira of the Ghitu?" He costs more, requires an attack to trigger, and has far less control over what he's going to hit. Granted, Jhoira is a monster, but if you're going to suspend, you probably want to make sure you're suspending something good. As a 5-drop, you're probably going to need some early plays (including some cheap unblockables to enable his trigger) which means a lot of weak hits in the deck. His activated ability could be quite important in the late-game, but outside of enabling suspend I'm not convinced it will be worth building around. The most obvious companion is Rose Tyler, which does provide some extra incentive to build around his activated, but at that point I suspect you're mostly just reconstructing the precon since her ability is pretty parasitic. Remove some of the less synergistic stuff and chuck in some fat eldrazis and you've got a deck, though I don't think it will be particularly powerful.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Another Jhoira-alike. The Eleventh has her mana value, and apes her activation cost, but the change to the suspend count makes him fairly awful. By the time anything good comes off suspend, you could probably have just cast it. Sure, there are ways to accelerate the process, but you could also just ramp them out normally and avoid telegraphing your plays. Amy Pond seems like the obvious choice of commander here, as she accelerates the process from the CZ while being made unblockable by the Doctor, but I still think this seems like a lot of effort for the payoff. 6 for your commanders, 4 to make them both unblockable - Jhoira could have just cast the stupid Eldrazi by now. Unless you really want white, I don't see the point.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Demonstrate is a really interesting ability, and potentially a large payoff. Adding it to permanents also increases the potential to do some truly gross things, like tripling up stax pieces or other symmetrical effects, and also provides lots of potential for political manipulation. Or you can just enjoy the value on its own - the downside of giving an opponent a copy is almost always going to be less significant than the copy for yourself. The setup cost isn't nothing, but as detailed earlier there are a lot of different ways to cast from outside the hand, and red and blue are probably the best colors to do so. The counter trigger is pretty trivial, not really sure why that's there except to fill in the text box. As far as companions, Yasmin Khan is an obvious choice to enable his ability, as is Ryan Sinclair (although he requires more work). Clara Oswald doesn't work with him, but Adric, Mathematical Genius does. Best option though is Romana II as long as you're copying permanents.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
She buries the lead a bit with her first ability - getting a counter isn't really exciting enough to be worth the effort of casting outside the hand. Her second ability is much more powerful, though, and makes the setup significantly more interesting. Unfortunately, The Fifth Doctor renders her somewhat obsolete, since he gives counters and guarantees untaps at a significantly lower setup cost, but she does have different colors and a lower mv. I doubt I'd ever play her over with Fifth in a vacuum, but she does play very nicely with Yasmin Khan, creating a nice curve and enabling each other. She also provides an alternative to the Fifth's combo with Adric, Mathematical Genius - getting the untap on the creatures you need is significantly harder, but of course green gives access to a plethora of mana dorks. You do need something else to use to exploit the untaps, though, because unlike Fifth her untap doesn't generate additional value on its own. Overall I think that probably makes it more complex to pull off, but at least you have more tools at your disposal, whereas the Fifth combo is pretty reliant on getting more specific cards to enable it.
Final Judgment: Good (only with Adric and Yasmin)
Final Judgment: Good (only with Adric and Yasmin)
The payoff is decent, but the setup is pretty significant. Attacking with a 5mv 4/4 is dicey, and unless you only want to do it once, you'll need additional clue generation, which is pretty specific. Casting something you've already cast is potentially okay, but the bigger payoff would be discarding a very expensive spell - but then that requires extra setup. The colors are weird here, too - red is very unhelpful for clue tokens, and neither color has the straightforward setup that, say, black would provide with Entomb. I think you'll really need to choose your companion for CI just to make this make sense. Poor Bill Potts, ignored up until now, is the only companion that cares about instants and sorceries, but unfortunately doesn't add a color and probably doesn't want the same spells that Fugitive does anyway. Blue or black would be ideal, but there are few synergistic options, outside of Clara Oswald (who could be good, but only exacerbates the setup cost). K-9, Mark I might actually be the best option, since it at least solves the attacking problem while adding a good color, but nothing is a great fit. I have a hard time seeing the plan working out here.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Time counters are a bit of a bear, since they lack the options available to, say, +1 counters, and thus make racking them up significantly slower. That said, War Doctor's ability triggers on a lot of stuff, so it shouldn't be difficult to rack them up pretty quickly, plus he can snipe creatures to rack them up himself, while making it easier to attack safely. Being able to go face as a finisher is great too. His stats are decent, but a companion to make his attacks safer (Tegan Jovanka, or K-9, Mark I - probably K-9 for blue) wouldn't hurt. Yasmin Khan provides a way to trigger on her own (though doesn't add a color). It's hard to ignore Clara Oswald, though, who doubles both his counter acquisition and his attack trigger, and gives you flexibility with color - she seems like the clear choice to me, unless the mana cost puts you off. Obvious synergies are impulse draw, exiling removal, phasing protection - but there are tons of other ways to exile cards, like grave hate, flashback, unearth, etc. There are a lot of ways to make this work, and enough flexibility that you won't need to warp your deck too badly around enabling him. Seems like a winner.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Companions
I have to admit, the flavor is pretty damn solid here. Mechanically, though, I don't think read ahead is really very strong. You're leaving value on the table if you use it, so unless a later mode is absolutely critical it rarely feels like the right choice. Not to say it's never worthwhile, but if I'm building a saga deck, her colleague, Ian Chesterton, seems like the much stronger choice. For Doctor, The Fourth Doctor, The Sixth Doctor, and The Eighth Doctor all have synergy, but my pick would be the Sixth. Having each copy of the saga doing different chapters could be sometimes relevant, i.e. getting two War of the Last Alliance would mean multiple turns of double strike. The best part is being able to go infinite with Three Blind Mice, which is probably the only legitimately powerful thing she can do. That's not enough to make her good, but it does bump her grades up a bit.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
The stronger saga commander, Ian can imitate what The Sixth Doctor can do, albeit at a cost. He has the same synergies as Barbara, though the Sixth is a little less interesting since he's copying the sagas already - not that an extra copy is a bad thing. But I could see going for something like The Second Doctor, which might provide the necessary time to build up enough mana to really go wild with the replication. However, since sagas are relatively few and and far between, it's probably still necessary to go with a Doctor that provides a third color, and I think Sixth is the best of those. The Fourth Doctor is a decent option too, but you'll want to tailor the deck more closely around the Doctor, with legendary lands and such.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Flavor is a bit on the nose here for me. Also unimpressive is that cost - 3 mana for cycling is absolutely brutal. There's no chance you're doing that just to draw a new card - you'd better be getting some serious value from discarding, perhaps some form of reanimation…unfortunately, there are no black Doctors (that sounded weird). The only doctor that seems to have much synergy here is the The Eighth Doctor, but it barely merits mentioning to be honest (and I already did, when I discussed the Eighth). You could build a fully cycling-focused deck, using largely non–historic cards with cycling, which I guess is an option, but there are certainly better options for that sort of thing, and none of the doctors really do much to help you. I guess I'll vote Eighth, since he's not getting picked anywhere else, but honestly none of this sounds like a good idea to me.
Final Judgment: Bad to the bone (like a biker thing…but not as cool)
Final Judgment: Bad to the bone (like a biker thing…but not as cool)
Convoke is a…decent…keyword. It seems like it dictates a lot about your deck to build around Peri - you want to go wide, and you also want to go historic, but even then you only get to convoke a single spell? She would be laughably bad as a standalone, but her ability to ramp out and assist The Sixth Doctor makes her at least a decent, if vanilla, choice for that build. You might want to go a little wide (not hard when the Sixth is copying your stuff), but it's not worth worrying about too much since you're limited to once per turn. Play her with the Sixth if you don't like the other options, otherwise she seems very forgettable.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Romana is more powerful than she might initially look - copying clues or treasure is pretty bland, but with the influx of cards which copy permanent spells, she has some much more exciting things to synthesize. Not to keep going back to the same well, but The Sixth Doctor is clearly the best choice here, as he consistently creates powerful tokens - copying a historic spell an additional time is definitely worthwhile, and unlike the Sixth himself, she can more easily multiply her value with untaps and activated-ability copying. Runner up is The Twelfth Doctor, though you'll need more support to perform the cast-from-outside-hand gimmick.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
It's interesting to see how much love this character gets, because I lowkey hated her while I was watching the show. As a card, she seems tailor made for The Tenth Doctor or The Eleventh Doctor, with no one else really making much sense (The War Doctor technically fits but is pretty middling). The tenth is the only one that has any interaction with permanents that have time counters, so he seems like the most synergistic choice. Unfortunately, the ultimate payoff is pretty unexciting - a very large 2-drop, yes, but still just a vanilla beater, and one that can be reset with removal. There aren't very many good permanents with time counters, either, so the build warp is significant to get there. As such, I don't think she's a very strong choice, though she will certainly win some games if opponents are slow and lack interaction.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
A very vanilla companion option, for the same commanders that have appeared a lot amongst white companions - The Fourth Doctor, The Sixth Doctor,and The Eighth Doctor. If you're not doing anything extra with the clue token, the Sixth probably makes the most sense - surprise, surprise - since the other two provide their own CA which renders hers less valuable, especially with the added cost. But unfortunately, I think she's no match for the value train that is Romana II. I could see running her with the Fourth if you find something useful to do with all those artifact tokens - Kappa Cannoneer, maybe? Whir of Invention? Or maybe you just prefer to slow roll your deck a bit. I don't think there's a great reason to run her, but she's at least a functional enough card, albeit boring.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Tegan fulfills a useful niche in her ability to enable safe attacks for the Doctor with no additional cost. That makes her a decent fit for The First Doctor, The Third Doctor, The Seventh Doctor, The Ninth Doctor, The Tenth Doctor, The War Doctor, and The Fugitive Doctor. I can't see running her based on her own merits, though a 3/3 indestructible isn't the worst, and does play nicely with board wipes in her native color. Of those commanders, the Ninth and War are easily my two favorites because of how strong they are individually, though the synergy they all share with Tegan is essentially the same.
Final Judgment: Dealer's Choice…I'd say good. She's a good fit for a specific role, no more no less.
Final Judgment: Dealer's Choice…I'd say good. She's a good fit for a specific role, no more no less.
Elephant in the room is the infinite combos he enables, but Adric is just a strong card overall, even outside of the Doctor Who set. He's going to see play in the 99 for tons of commanders with strong activated and triggered abilities, and he's got synergy with just about everything under the sun. Even if you're primarily interested in either activated or triggered, the other type is going to pop up all the time - if your commander has a strong triggered ability, you can still copy fetchlands, for example. The sac ability is nice to have on hand, too. He's so versatile that it's hard to say anything specific about him. His best Doctors are obviously the two infinite combo options, though he plays nicely with most of them. Clara Oswald can be more economical in the long run, but he can synergize with Doctors that she can't, like the The First Doctor and The Twelfth Doctor.
Final Judgment: Good. Great. Genius, even.
Final Judgment: Good. Great. Genius, even.
The only 1-drop companion (the only mv1 partner is also a dog, curiously), K-9 is appropriately pretty weak. Ward 1 is barely a speed bump - if it's worth killing your creature, it's worth paying one more - so most of the value here comes from the activated unblockability. As such, he's in competition with Tegan Jovanka for enabling attack triggers. He's more expensive to use, but he does actually get damage through rather than just prevent blocks from being lethal. He's also a different color, though, which makes him a solid option for The War Doctor, though the vast majority of Doctors come with blue included. Sure, he's a pretty free roll, but I think every Doctor can do quite a bit better.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
More unblockability enabling, but Martha requires a lot more setup. Only The Seventh Doctor can repeatedly create clues, and that seems to be missing the point somewhat. I think probably the best place for her is with the Third, since they both care about clues, though you'd need to make the clues (and sacrifice them) yourself. That's a hell of a lot of work for a very middling payoff, so I don't really see any justification for playing her. The only thing she offers over K-9, Mark I (besides a single clue) is that she herself is made unblockable, but is that really going to matter?
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
How awkward. Sure, theoretically you can put other sorts of counters onto him, but realistically none of the doctors can put anything besides a +1 counter on him, which of course disables his undying. And before he gets those counters, he's probably pointless. So best case scenario, the undying is worth one chump block on an early turn - after that it's basically irrelevant. What a waste of a powerful keyword. The rest of him, however, isn't bad - paired with The Fourth Doctor, The Thirteenth Doctor, or perhaps The First Doctor, he can generate a lot of mana reasonably quickly, and untap on the end step to hold up counterspell mana. Unfortunately his blue CI is basically useless, and I don't think he's likely to be the first pick when Adric, Mathematical Genius is around, so I doubt he'll see much utility, but he's not awful per se.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Sorry, do you mean Nissa? We've got two Nissas now? I'm glad that's not confusing. Nyssa is a companion that wants her own build-around, and potentially deserves it. She's not a bad eggs commander by any stretch. Probably her best synergy is with The Fourth Doctor, who provides extra fodder plus free draw for eggs off the top of the deck. The Sixth Doctor isn't bad either, but seems overly qualified for the task of copying 1 and 2-drop cantripping eggs. As with other blue companions, her CI is a bit of a downside, since you'll usually only be picking up a single additional color from the Doctor. On that score, I could see advocating for The Seventh Doctor or The Second Doctor in order to get white for the eggy recursion pieces - I don't think green will do much, even if Fourth is best in a vacuum. Either way, though, I think you'll want to prioritize Nyssa over the Doctor himself in order to get maximum value from her, because she outpaces most of them pretty easily when built around.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Vislor is the only black option, excluding Clara Oswald, so it's a shame that he kinda…sucks. Drawing an extra card every turn is great, but at the cost he's offering it…not so much, unless you're playing hellbent, which is rarely a good plan, and not one any of the Doctors are well set up to support. If you're planning to give him away, he could rack up a decent amount of damage, but he doesn't protect himself from sacrifice or removal, he's easy to suicide-attack so long as the defending player isn't committed to screwing the attacker over. Even in the best case, he's still providing the player with extra ammunition that they'll probably be ramming down your throat in an effort to stop the bleeding (unless they can empty their hand, in which case he's just free money for them). So I can't really see an angle from which to make Vislor much good - there's just way too many ways for him to backfire. But for Doctors which have little or no synergy with Clara Oswald (1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12), he's still better than a vanilla 2/6 for 6, so if you really want access to black, he does still have utility - maybe you play him when you're hellbent or on high life and low draw, or maybe someone has 20 cards in hand and no sac outlets. So he's not useless, but he's definitely a begrudging companion, not one you're glad to have along for the ride.
Final Judgment: Bad, but still playable.
Final Judgment: Bad, but still playable.
Amy is the only companion to have an extra option - unfortunately, as established earlier, Rory Williams is absolute trash, so it doesn't really matter. Since she's focused on time counters, she's basically restricted to The Tenth Doctor and The Eleventh Doctor, which I'm not really a huge fan of. Tenth she's not a great fit for, since she doesn't add a color and she's a liability in combat, plus he's got a built-in way to accelerate the suspend count - though being able to suspend on attacks, and remove counters on damage, is a nice sequence so it could be salvageable if not amazing. The Eleventh Doctor, though, seems like her one true home - he can get her through for damage, plus provide targets. As I've already said, I think the Eleventh is pretty bad, but Amy is really the clear choice for him, and him for her, such as it is.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
An odd-one-out, there's really no direct synergy for Bill amongst the Doctors. Best we've got is The Fugitive Doctor, but there aren't many spells expensive enough to want to flashback that target your own creatures. Technically The First Doctor, The Eleventh Doctor, and The Thirteenth Doctor also synergize, but it's minor enough that it hardly seems worth mentioning. Having played Ivy, Gleeful Spellthief, copying single-target spells can be worth a lot - cheap cantrips become Divinations, buff spells become twice as powerful, protective spells can keep both commanders alive, etc. But finding a good fit for them is tricky. Something generically-good like The Second Doctor might be your best bet. Honestly, though, they're still a pale imitation of Ivy - costs twice as much, doesn't have evasion, can't copy permanent spells, can't copy enemy spells, and can only copy one per turn - so I'm not so sure there's much point to building around it at all, even if it's a decent effect. It just doesn't play to the strengths of the available Doctors.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
I'll admit the idea of beating your opponents to death with food is pretty amusing. Dan definitely isn't the strongest option - I kinda get "Jerry" vibes - but he does have a few niches, notably with the The Third Doctor, and possibly The Fourth Doctor and The Seventh Doctor. Unfortunately, the Third isn't a very strong starting place, and I think the Fourth and Seventh have better options.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
I can envision two ways to use Donna - one, as a janky form of evasion, and two, as a way to deal loads of damage combo-style with Blasphemous Act and similar. The first option seems pretty weak - we've already seen multiple companions that enable much more reliable evasion - but she does provide a different color, so perhaps she's worth using if the color is your goal, and you're not interested in what the other companions are offering. The combo-adjacent route is okay but still seems fairly mediocre to me - it doesn't have much obvious combination with any Doctors, and it only targets a single opponent at a time. The doctors that perhaps make the most sense here are The Third Doctor - since putting enough blocks in front of his trample will mean a significant amount of damage - or The Fifth Doctor, since he can boost your team out of range of your damage-based board wipe.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Ryan has a fairly significant overhead - his Gray Ogre stats make him both a risky attacker, and unlikely to luck into a "hit" - so buffing his power and/or granting evasion are both pretty important. The payoff is potentially there - freecasting is always good, and there are a decent number of Doctors which want spells cast from exile - but he's in competition with Yasmin Khan, and at 2mv spells or less, there isn't a lot of payoff for Ryan without a power boost. At high mana values, freecasting becomes a bigger game, but that requires a lot of power-boosting and more topdeck luck, whereas Yasmin requires nothing else to be effective. If you're interested in playing voltron, Ryan could make more sense, but if you just want to enable a Doctor, Yasmin is the far easier ticket. The Twelfth Doctor, The Thirteenth Doctor, and The War Doctor all have synergy, but I think the Thirteenth makes the most sense - she adds two colors, and buffs his power naturally (though counting on her buff alone could be slow going).
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Besides being a decent standalone card, Yasmin is a great fit for a lot of commanders - she gets double value from The Fifth Doctor and The Thirteenth Doctor, clears your topdeck for The Fourth Doctor, provides a guaranteed trigger for The War Doctor, and can hit demonstrable spells for The Twelfth Doctor. Thirteenth is the one she's most obviously built to work with - they have three colors, fit a nice curve, and synergize quite nicely. The wording of her ability means she can happily activate during enemy turns and still have a main-phase window to cast the spell, so she can take full advantage of the untap. Her effect is similar to that of Prosper - minus the treasure, but she comes with a Doctor to provide the extra value, so I think they're fairly comparable - and Prosper is extremely popular, so I expect she will be as well.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
A green rebel? Lin Sivvi, Defiant Hero just cannot catch a break. Ace has the potential to be very annoying for decks with a small board presence and a critically-important commander - for example, Mizzix of the Izmagnus. Outside of those specific circumstances, she's going to take a fair bit of support to attack, fight, and survive, especially since she has to fight a creature from the defending player, who probably isn't going to willingly let her live after she's merced one of their creatures. I'm not a huge fan of this sort of effect, since locking players' commanders out of a game can draw a lot of political heat, but if you can tolerate the heat it does have the potential to be powerful. For a Doctor, The Fourth Doctor provides a steady supply of artifacts, The Third Doctor would prefer you stop smashing them, and the The Seventh Doctor can provide them as well, though it means abstaining from his primary goal and also protecting both of them from combat, which is a fairly tall order. The Seventh is still probably the best way to go to build an Ace-focused deck, since he adds another color and can use the same equipment to avoid dying in combat, but the Fourth is probably the simplest way to use her as a side-piece (though you do miss out on another color).
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
The only payoff from the companion side for "cast from somewhere other than you hand", Graham technically fits the synergy bill for a lot of commanders, but probably isn't the payoff you're looking for. It's a shame Fugitive isn't more hungry than investigative, or they'd be a perfect pairing. The The Twelfth Doctor and The Thirteenth Doctor both look like they'd get along, but I don't really think the payoff is going to fit. Maybe the best payoff is the The Third Doctor, since he actually wants the food tokens, and could use a token engine in the command zone, albeit one that requires his own build-around. The Seventh Doctor is also a solid choice, and adds a color, though the food tokens have diminishing returns once you've gotten to a sufficiently large number. Neither of those commanders natively care about casting from not-hand, though, so if you're committed to playing Graham you're stuck between a commander that's good at enabling him but doesn't care about the payoff, or cares about the payoff but has to jump through hoops to enable him. Personally I'd prefer the latter, but neither option is overly appealing.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
There's a lot of historic support among the Doctors, so Jamie makes a lot of sense in the companion slot. However, the payoff is somewhat dubious - his base stats are very low, so you're forced to tap yourself out precombat to pump him up in order to have a decent attack. This play pattern seems pretty precon-y, to coin a term. Sure, he can get decently large, but is a decently-sized trampler really the payoff you want for historic? Most historic synergies are pretty value-focused, so an aggressive companion doesn't necessarily fit the plan, and I'm skeptical that the buff will be enough to hack it in the world of commander. The best fit is probably with The Eighth Doctor, since he gives two more colors and provides reliable extra fodder, though The Fourth Doctor is cheaper and stronger overall.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
Like Jamie McCrimmon, Leela is a dumb beater in a format that doesn't generally incentivize dumb beaters. Unlike Jamie, she doesn't even have evasion. But what she does have is the ability to grow very quickly, particularly when used alongside wheels. I wouldn't consider any of the Doctors to have any particular synergy with wheels, but including a few in the deck could provide a potential surprise kill on occasion, or you could build the deck more closely around Leela with wheels and evasion/protection equipment. There are many easier voltron builds out there, but it can definitely be done. The obvious Doctor choice is The Second Doctor, though as mentioned it does create some added tension that might result in your opponents choosing not to accept the draw when they otherwise would. On the other hand, you could pick a doctor for the colors - one of the UR ones give the most wheel options. If you're going all-in on the Wheela © plan, that seems like the best way to go.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
A very straightforward companion, Susan is a decent choice for a deck that wants green, wants to ramp out the doctor, and doesn't want to muck around with any additional synergies to build around. If you just want to get The War Doctor out on turn 3 every game without committing a bunch of slots to ramp, Susan is your girl. If you're playing planechase, she gets a bit more spicy, but for the rest of us there's no real way to build "around" her. The Fifth Doctor and The Thirteenth Doctor have some nominal synergy with her, but it's pretty minor. Having guaranteed ramp is nice, but on the other hand, how often are you going to bother recasting her if she dies to a board wipe? You can use her if you don't have anything more interesting, but I think most decks will prefer a companion with more legs.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
If you want to have a completely unique commander, run Clara without a Doctor and enjoy being the only human being on the planet to do so. But if you're not that much of a hipster, it's impossible to talk about Clara without considering the Doctors she works with. The Fourth Doctor and The Sixth Doctor have zero synergy with her, and The First Doctor, The Third Doctor, The Eighth Doctor, and The Twelfth Doctor have essentially none. That still leaves quite a few options though. For my money, the spiciest are The Ninth Doctor and The War Doctor - both powerful commanders in their own right - though there are many other strong choices. The biggest knock on Clara is her cost - as such, it's probably best to build the deck on the assumption that the Doctor must start generating value without Clara on the field for a few turns - but she's obviously going to be a popular choice since she just amplifies whatever you were already doing, and she provides any color (especially the otherwise-difficult black).
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Whew, all done, seventy-six commanders in the bag. Thank god that's over with. Wait, what's that? There's ANOTHER universes beyond product this month? Sigh…fine. At least it's a short list. Let's get it over with.
LOTR Scene Box Commanders
Seven is a lot of mana for a commander with no immediate impact (even if you give it haste it probably does nothing interesting on the first turn). That said, impulse drawing five cards is nothing to sneeze at, and it does have some built-in protection. The biggest strength here is that he works quite reasonably as a standalone card. Yes, he has that obligatory tribal payoff, but realistically there's no way it's worth the effort of cramming a bunch of mediocre wraiths into your deck just so you can dig a couple cards deeper. The Nazgul are even anti-synergistic with him, since they'll disable his undying when they etb. So how good is impulse drawing 5 cards, perhaps more with equipment? It's definitely a lot of gas, but at seven mana I think it's pretty par for the course. Not bad, not amazing. At least that art goes hard.
Final Judgment: Bad (just barely)
Final Judgment: Bad (just barely)
I'm almost uniquely qualified to speak about Aragorn, having once played a Cazur and Ukkima deck that focused on Cazur rather than whatever degenerate nonsense cEDH was using Ukkima for. Aragorn is strictly better than Cazur in effect - adds first strike, counters that increase exponentially instead of linearly, and a little extra p/t, but he doesn't have a partner and he has different colors. One might argue that different colors doesn't mean worse, but in this case I would say they are quite wrong. Blue is by far the most important color for Cazur, for two reasons. First, it provides a near-limitless supply of 1-drop unblockables. White, red, and green have much weaker options on that front. Second, there are quite a few Coastal Piracy effects in blue. There are a couple in green, and some significantly weaker versions in other colors, but blue really gives the depth you want for consistency. As far as what we get in return…big meh. Exponential counters sounds cool, but it's glacially slow. First hit gives one counter. Second hit gives another counter - perhaps more if the creature got counters from elsewhere - but unless it cares about the counters for other reasons, it won't be until the third hit that it does something more significant than what Cazur could provide. And that's just way too slow to be any good in 2023. Especially when you're also missing blue's counterspells to protect your board from wipes and whatever else your opponents are doing. Best bet is probably to just go wide with tokens, but surely Jetmir, Nexus of Revels is a much stronger commander for that sort of thing. Aragorn's not even good with inherent renowned creatures, since the first trigger blocks the second. I wish we could swap his text with Rohirrim Chargers from the same product - a much more compelling ability, that actually pays off playing the keyword it references instead of punishing it.
Final Judgment: Bad
Final Judgment: Bad
A five-drop bant commander that spews value when you do creatures - sounds pretty Chulane to me. But while Galadriel is similar on the surface, she plays pretty differently I think. Chulane wasn't limited to once per turn like Galadriel is, but he also didn't trigger from creature tokens. Those two things go quite nicely hand-in-hand I think, since putting creatures into play on enemy turns to maximize triggers is much easier with tokens. Personally I'd focus on instants and abilities that put put 1-2 tokens into play, and then try to hit the draw mode and counter mode as often as possible to build up a huge board while digging for constant gas. This even lets you keep up answers more consistently since you're leaving up mana to cast/activate your token production. That said, even the braindead version of the deck that just runs normal creatures can milk the commander for a Gilded Lotus + Loyal Guardian + Palantir of Orthanc every turn, so maybe she's just a pretty busted value commander no matter how you slice it. Still, I want to be optimistic here, so I'll hold back on giving her an "ugly" rating - though I would certainly be wary of her on the other side of the table.
Final Judgment: Good (I hope)
Final Judgment: Good (I hope)
Let's acknowledge that the word "sorcery" is indeed printed on the card. And then let's ignore it, because cramming in a bunch of flash enablers plus a bunch of sorceries is way overcomplicating things for dubious benefit. Just play instants and enjoy the consistency. However, instants can be somewhat limited in their versatility - lots of answers, not as much productivity. Draw spells are productive in a sense, but they still don't constitute a wincon in themselves. Burn spells, even when double-cast, seem too weak for commander, plus a lot of them are X spells which won't work so well. Counterspells, of course, are ineffective generally, but modal counterspells can still work (alternately, you could try to remove time counters in response to an enemy spell in order to un-suspend your counterspell at the right moment - probably not worth relying on, especially since on-board time-counter removal will be predictable, but a fun trick). Politically I do worry about having suspended removal hanging over peoples' heads - solid chance he draws more hate than he merits, so keep an eye on that. One minor note worth mentioning - Adventures are quite interesting here, as you can cast the adventure half, suspend the spell, and then cast the permanent half (with haste!) for free once it comes off suspend. Maybe the simplest way to win is with the old spellslinger standby of Guttersnipe and co. But there are also some interesting tricks to be found in instants, and while token production is somewhat lacking, going wide into a Mirrorweave can accomplish some serious shenanigans. I don't expect Gandalf will actually be very good - suspend three is a pretty long time, especially when you probably aren't bringing down game ending bombs like Jhoira of the Ghitu - but commander has always struggled to find a spellslinger deck that does clever, limited-style shenanigans rather than vomiting a slurry of storm nonsense, and suspend does seem like an effort to enable the former.
Final Judgment: Good
Final Judgment: Good
Okay, are we done yet? No more sneaky bastards hiding in jumpstart packs or secret lairs or the extra-special ultimate-collector packs you can only get by saying "Mark Rosewater" into a mirror three times?
At least we're done with Universes Beyond for a while. And by "a while" I mean for a month, when we start getting Jurassic Park cards. I'll keep my shotgun by the door.
Until next time cowpokes.
@cheonice Thanks! Takes ages to write these things because of how many legends go into everything these days.