Upgrading Commander Precon - Timey-Wimey (The Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler)

In the card game scene, a preconstructed product will never be 100% ready, and will never have the best options available, be it to motivate the player and have them go after the new cards, and thus upgrade their deck, or because of personal tastes. After all, it's impossible to please all players at the same time, and a buyer might simply not like all the options added to the original preconstructed product.

Hence, it doesn't matter how much a deck is well-built, even if it has a great mana base and expensive cards; there's always space for upgrades, and adding cards that are better suited to each deck's philosophy. Commander decks from the Universes Beyond - Doctor Who set are just like this.

In this article, we'll discuss the Timey Wimey deck from this set, built with red, blue and white cards. It is one of the most coveted decks nowadays - both because of its new cards and reprints and the character it represents. As a great Doctor Who fan, I must confess upgrading this deck was a tremendous honor.

This deck is already unusual because of its preestablished commanders, The Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler. Indeed, it was built focusing on the synergy between these two commanders, but it also has space for the other legendary creatures present in the deck to shine.

However, we'll change, just a bit, even these commanders' structure, bringing not only a better synergy, but also a much more interesting and less boring character than Rose Tyler.

The Timey Wimey deck comes with the following cards:

The Tenth Doctor is probably the most memorable and beloved reincarnation of Doctor Who's main title character, played by David Tennant, the actor. As for Rose Tyler, she was one of the first new companions in the latest version of the iconic TV show, which is a continuation of the first classic series. Like so, we have two well-beloved characters, but let's see what their cards do:

The Tenth Doctor's first ability is triggered any time you, the player, declares an attack, be it with a 1/1 token or even the Doctor themselves. It allows us to reveal cards from the top of our deck until we find a card that isn't a land. Then, we'll place three time counters on this card and exile it, giving it the suspend mechanic, which will cast it for free after three time counters are removed (which are naturally removed at each upkeep step).

But, if we'd rather not wait long and tedious Commander turns to do this, we can activate the Timey-Wimey ability, which, for 7 mana, will provide us with access to the Time Travel mechanic three times. Time Travel allows us to place or remove time counters from cards that already have it, be them suspended in exile or on our battlefield. Keep in mind this idea that the Tenth Doctor allows us to activate this three times, because it will be important in the future.

Rose Tyler isn't a particularly complicated card, and isn't full of nuances, but it has a great synergy with The Tenth Doctor, besides being the only companion in white that is already included in this deck - the others are either red or blue, which makes it impossible for this deck to be a Jeskai deck.

Companion is a mechanic designed to give your Doctors more colors, and a creature with this keyword can be paired with any other creature that has, specifically, two types: Time Lord, and Doctor, and nothing else. This mechanic was designed like this by Gavin Verhey to, just as you'd imagine it, prevent players from using this ability with Changelings, such as Orvar, the All-Form.

Rose's main ability allows her to grow according to cards that have time counters, becoming bigger and bigger as time goes on. However, she doesn't have evasive abilities that could take advantage of this, and depends on external sources to make it worth our time.

As our first upgrade to this deck, we can reuse some of the companions present in the Blast from the Past deck. However, my favorite option, undoubtedly, is Clara Oswald.

Clara, when placed in the commander zone alongside a Doctor, can adopt any color you'd like, which will open numerous opportunities for us. However, as we're just upgrading this preconstructed deck, and not rebuilding it entirely, we'll keep her in White.

Her ability repeats Doctors' triggered ability, which will allow us to trigger The Tenth Doctor's Allons-y! ability, suspending another card with our David Tennant. Clara Oswald is a strong option for our deck, and doesn't require us to restructure it and its mana base entirely.

Cards Removed

A very interesting fact about some cards in this set is that, even though they don't fit their original decks 100%, it is very easy to rehome them in other decks.

Martha Jones, another brilliant Doctor companion, can struggle to find recursion for her effects in this deck, once our options to create clue tokens are quite scarce. However, in the Blast from the Past deck, which focuses on the first eight Doctors, it is much more common to find these types of tokens, and is, therefore, a better home for her. Sally Sparrow is another interesting card that can be removed from this deck and rehomed in Blast from the Past, due to its synergy.

The same goes for The Eleventh Hour, the Saga that references the very first Doctor Who episode I've ever watched in my life. This ability, besides creating a food token and creating a Human creature token, can lower the cost of other Doctors, besides tutoring a Doctor in your deck and even copying it later on. Obviously, this saga is much better suited for the aforementioned Blast from the Past deck, in which Doctors matter a lot more, and being able to tutor one of them is a very positive effect.

Anyway, instead of discussing cards we can remove from one deck and add to another, let's talk about cards that we can remove for good and store them in our shoeboxes until they are necessary. We have Jenny, Generated Anomaly, the Doctor's daughter in the series' canon, and the Fifth Doctor's daughter and the Tenth Doctor's wife in real life. This legendary creature interacts with the Explore ability, which doesn't have much synergy with the rest of the deck, and therefore ends up a bit left out.

RMS Titanic is another card that looks neat to me, but doesn't add anything to this deck. It can create several treasures, once per match, but you need to wait for the turn to go back to you so you can then attack and sacrifice this Vehicle, figure out a way to minimize the chances of it being blocked to maximize the number of spells you can use, etc... It is quite slow and will rarely leave you that ahead everyone else in the game.

These are just a few examples of cards that can be removed, but we can quickly list some cards like Adipose Offspring, Astrid Peth, The Girl in the Fireplace and others which are quite interesting for fans of the mad man in a blue box TV show, but that don't really add much to this deck.

What to Add?

The most common option mentioned across the internet when we discuss how to upgrade this deck, without a question, is Jhoira of the Ghitu, which can give a certain redundancy to The Tenth Doctor, exiling cards as if they had suspend and speeding up our strategy.

We only have to be careful to not exile an Everybody Lives, for instance, with this ability. Speaking of Jhoira, Jhoira's Timebug is a cool little creature which allows us an ability similar to time travel.

We can also add cards that already have suspend naturally, such as, for instance, Detritivore, which will allow us a land destruction when combined with the time travel abilities.

Speaking of suspend, we have previously mentioned how the main number we should keep in mind when considering suspend was 3, due to The Tenth Doctor's ability of time travelling three times. Thanks to this, we can add cards with suspend 3 without further issues, once we can cast them with our commander's ability.

Lotus Bloom and Mox Tantalite fit this deck perfectly thanks to this. And, if you want to spice things up, with The Face of Boe, these cards become an unbreakable Black Lotus or a Mox Diamond that goes in without discarding lands. Besides this, zero-cost cards converse really well with As Foretold, which is already added to this deck.

Well, we discussed several cards with suspend 3, but now we'll discuss the best cards with suspend 3; cards that are very alike Inspiring Refrain, which already comes in this deck. These cards, besides having suspend 3, suspend themselves again with 3 counters at the end of their resolution, allowing The Tenth Doctor to use their abilities sequentially.

Arc Blade is a Shock, dealing two damage to any target, and then exiling itself. Chronomantic Escape is a much stronger card that also exiles itself, and you can prevent your opponents from attacking you until their next turn. It is extremely simple to use this card to exhaustion with the time travel mechanic.

And last, we have the greatest of all, Rousing Refrain. With it an opponent with at least seven cards in hand, we can create an infinite time travel loop, capable of casting numerous Arc Blade to deal infinite damage, or multiple Reality Strobe that will allow you to return permanents to your opponents' hands. Yes, permanents, with no restriction of being lands or not. By the way, this would help you fill your opponents' hands and create infinite mana, maybe for a big spell, such as Banefire, to destroy your opponents.

Or, if you don't want to use the Arc Blade combo, you can ignore it and use another combo instead: perhaps Rousing Refrain and Inspiring Refrain might be a good combo, drawing several cards and allowing you to use a Laboratory Maniac, or worse, a Thassa's Oracle. Boring and common? Yes. But it also works.

Our deck, in its final form, looks a bit like this:

One of the commanders that is available in this deck is Kate Stewart, current chief of the UNIT military corporation in Doctor Who's lore.

This deck is focused on using time counters to summon Soldiers, besides buffing them. Like so, we opted to use this commander and a few pieces that are already included in this preconstructed deck to build a deck focused on this character as the protagonist.

As it is evident, we didn't change the mana base. Of course, you can upgrade it with shocklands, Raugrin Triome and etc, but, at the end of the day, this deck comes out of its box with an already incredible mana base; one of the best ever seen in a preconstructed deck.

This allows us to build more effective decks without worrying about spending so much when we buy the lands, which will lead us to decks with endless possibilities, just like the Doctor's adventures.

See you next time!