Commander Deck Tech - The Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond

Ever since Universes Beyond - Doctor Who was announced, I knew this day would come. It is time to play a deck with the first Doctor I ever had the pleasure to watch, and the first companion this Doctor had.

In today's article, we'll discuss The Eleventh Doctor, the renowned culmination of all the most recent reincarnations this character has lived through, and the precursor of a new age for this franchise, besides his first companion, Amy Pond.

This is my favorite Doctor, played in the TV show by Matt Smith, who has recently played Milo in Morbius (2022). The Eleventh Doctor, besides having incredible hair and style, became an incredibly fun Commander card.

His main ability is a triggered ability. Whenever The Eleventh Doctor deals damage to an opponent, his controller can exile a card from their hand and put a number of time counters on it equivalent to its mana value. It will also give this card suspend, and each counter will eventually be removed throughout your upkeep steps. This applies to any card, including lands and 0-cost cards like Ancestral Vision.

However, the rules regarding the suspend mechanic state that the card in question will be cast as soon as the last time counter is removed. So, if we exile a Tundra, or a Lotus Bloom, or any 0-cost card, it won't be cast as soon as the last counter is removed because the card in question didn't get any time counters to begin with. This type of acceleration isn't available in this deck.

Amy Pond was the first person The Eleventh Doctor saw just after regenerating, and was the last person he saw before he regenerated into The Twelfth Doctor. As she is essential for Eleventh's adventures, has a natural synergy with his abilities, and is also one of my favorite characters, I chose her as the companion for this deck.

Her ability is as simple as the Doctor this deck uses - whenever she deals combat damage to a player, you'll remove a number of time counters equivalent to her damage to a target spell we control that is suspended in exile. Naturally, both her effect and The Eleventh Doctor's effect interact with double strike, trample, and, of course, his second ability.

If we spend , we'll make a target creature with 3 power or less unblockable until the end of the turn. This ability works splendidly in this deck, considering it allows us to deal damage with our smaller creatures and trigger the effects of our commanders and a few other certain cards. Still, this ability is better in the early stages of the match because, later on, we'll use effects to grow these creatures and make them more threatening at the end of the game.

Finally, Amy Pond is Rory Williams' partner, and, even though he's not a commander, we can easily look for him with her when we put her on the board. This means he is quite accessible in early turns, and is practically a third commander, but, unfortunately, he can't interact with cards that benefit commanders, such as Flaming Fist.

In any case, our favorite roman centurion is decent in combat and helps other mechanics in this deck, besides being interesting when we tutor him very early on.

As soon as I got my hands on Timey-Wimey, another Universes Beyond - Doctor Who deck, a really elaborate idea popped up in my head: I wanted to use these two commanders together. Unfortunately, simply swapping the main commanders in that deck, The Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler, for the commanders in this article didn't get me anywhere, so I was forced to work on it a bit more.

The deck we'll discuss below is my personal The Eleventh Doctor Amy Pond list that I built with the help of my great friend, and excellent deckbuilder, Guilherme Ceschini.

This deck focuses on interactions with historic cards, that is, artifacts, legendary cards, and sagas, to create an aggressive structure that will allow us to attack again and again, and like so remove several time counters from our cards with Amy Pond. This will allow us to place more spells on the board for free.

The list we'll use is the following:

As said above, historic cards are legendary permanents, artifacts, and sagas. And, indeed, our deck works really well with this card category, considering it includes several historic cards or cards that interact with them.

Furthermore, we must admit our commanders only work at specific moments in the match - combat phases. So, using background-type enchantments significantly boosts our main characters, and makes them bigger threats.

Flaming Fist is one of the best examples of this, considering it allows our commander's abilities to trigger twice in a combat, thanks to double strike. Additionally, Passionate Archaeologist allows us to deal damage with both our commanders' abilities because it capitalizes on what they do best: play suspended cards from exile. This background enchantment turns the cost of a card that came out of suspension into damage, and this makes it even better when both our commanders get this effect; with these cards in play, casting a 5-cost card will deal ten damage to an opponent.

Another background card that scales nicely with our two commanders on the board is Feywild Visitor, which creates a huge number of tokens.

Apart from background enchantments, we can always count on other support cards, such as Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle, which pulls small creatures from our graveyard into our board, including our commanders.

Jhoira, Weatherlight Captain draws us several cards whenever historic cards enter play. Gold Forged Thopteryx also seems to have been made to protect our legendary permanents, considering that, with this card on the board, it will be harder for your opponent to target them.

And, of course, Heroes' Podium is an excellent way to make our legendary creatures huge and improve effects like Amy Pond's, which are based on the damage she deals.

As said previously, our main creatures interact with combat damage. So, we'll use whatever we can to deal damage, like various types of evasion.

Our commander himself, The Eleventh Doctor, allows us to grant "can't be blocked" to creatures with 3 power or less. This is perfect both for him and Amy Pond, which start the game off small, and the other creatures we want to attack with all the time, such as Delina, Wild Mage, and The War Doctor.

Archetype of Imagination and Archetype of Aggression are perfect for this job, considering they not only give all your creatures some type of evasion, but also remove this same evasion from enemy creatures, and like so disable strategies that use them, such as tribal decks that focus on spirits, UW Flyers, dinosaurs and others.

We also have other enchantments and effects that give us more evasion. Street Riot gives trample to your creatures, and Sword Coast Sailor gives your commanders "can't be blocked".

Midnight Pathlighter only allows legendary creatures to block your creatures, and, at the end, Vexilus Praetor gives our commander essentially protection against everything, and prevents them from being blocked or targeted.

Psychic Paper and Prowler’s Helm are two wonderful equipment cards to make creatures unblockable. By the way, Psychic Paper can change the type of the creature it is equipped to, something I used more than once in my favor to pilot the TARDIS, which needs a Time Lord on the board to activate its cascade effect.

Finally, we also have Rogue's Passage in this deck to make a few key creatures unblockable.

In this deck, we have a few combos between The Tenth Doctor and some specific cards. However, even though these combos tend to extend infinitely, I decided not to use anything that ended the game on the spot, and instead use strong synergies that will happen frequently.

The Tenth Doctor demands 7 mana to time travel three times in a row, which is perfect for cards like Inspiring Refrain and Chronomantic Escape. After they leave their "suspended" state, these cards will self-exile again with exactly three counters, the perfect number for The Tenth Doctor to interact with them.

We also have, among these cards, Rousing Refrain, which creates mana according to the number of cards in the target opponent's hand. If our opponent has seven or more cards, we can play this effect several times. And, if we consider The Tenth Doctor, we will remove three counters from this sorcery, which will then create seven mana or more and self-exile again with three counters, which once again will be perfect for Tenth to activate his effect again.

With this, we will always be able to refill the mana we spent to activate this ability, besides drawing as many cards as we want with Inspiring Refrain, return as many permanents as we want to our opponent's hands with Reality Strobe, and every turn we'll be safe from attacks with Chronomantic Escape.

But, of course, with our commanders and Passionate Archaeologist, which we can easily put in play with the somewhat infinite mana Rousing Refrain gives us, and Inspiring Refrain's card draw, we can trigger infinite damage on our opponents.

The version below is a bit cheaper, and was built for those who dare venturing into time and space with the TARDIS. The only luxury I decided to keep is Passionate Archaeologist, precisely because it works really well with the rest of this deck.

This is how our budget list turned out:

This is, probably, my favorite MTG deck of all time. I really like how it develops and performs, besides the fact it has my favorite TV show characters.

Any time I get this deck out to play, it's like I am starting a new adventure with The Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond, and this really warms my heart.

Thank you for reading, and until next time!