Conditions Allow - The First Doctor EDH

Smaller on the Outside

The Doctor Who set is finally upon us, and players are excited to play their favorite Doctor or finally lead the Daleks to their ultimate victory. Personally, I'm excited to fully embrace the experience of stealing a powerful space ship and time machine in order to flee responsibility and explore the mysteries of the universe. Later Doctors may have flashier abilities, but The First Doctor lets you steal the TARDIS directly from your library.

The First Doctor may be our commander, but the TARDIS is the real star of the show here. Whenever it attacks and we control a Doctor, the next spell we cast that turn has cascade. In turn, whenever you cast a spell with cascade, The First Doctor puts a +1/+1 counter on a creature or artifact. For a companion, I'm choosing Clara Oswald to double up on those +1/+1 counters. The goal is to maintain card advantage through cascade while steadily growing our creatures with The First Doctor.

Casting From Other Worlds

Choosing Clara Oswald as our companion also lets us choose a third color, and I'm choosing red. Passionate Archaeologist is a potential win condition that doesn't require combat, especially when combined with Keeper of Secrets, Flaming Tyrannosaurus, and Memory Worm. Iraxxa, Empress of Mars also helps keep the pressure up with a steady supply of 2/2 tokens. If you have an opening to attack, however, The War Doctor gets very scary, very fast. His effect counts each card you exile as you cascade individually, and with Clara to double both his triggers, The War Doctor easily lives up to his name.

If you'd rather not draw that much attention, however, this deck can also play for longer games. Vega, the Watcher and Jori En, Ruin Diver both provide extra cards on top of our already extra spells. The Twelfth Doctor gives you the option to make those extra spells better, but if you don't want to offer your opponents any value, Storm of Saruman, Tomb of Horrors Adventurer, and Mizzix, Replica Rider all perform a similar function.

The TARDIS may give any of our spells cascade, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't include any cards that don't cascade naturally. Aurora Phoenix keeps coming back, while Ethersworn Sphinx lets us cascade into just about any other spell in our deck. Ingenuity Engine is another big mana value spell, but it's really here to sacrifice the TARDIS if it would be exiled. The First Doctor also lets you search your graveyard to get it back. Finally, Into the Time Vortex is two free cascades.

More TARDIS

On its own, the TARDIS can only give one spell cascade in a single turn. Having more TARDISes won't give more spells cascade, but it will still let us cascade more. While that's a lot of value, especially turn after turn, it's not really an approach I'm leaning into. Even with multiple instances of cascade, The First Doctor still only triggers once. Wild-Magic Sorcerer turns that into two guaranteed +1/+1 counters a turn, but we need a different approach to really have the damage add up.

Extra combats really get us where we want to go. By attacking with the TARDIS and then casting an instant before the next combat, you can give two spells a turn cascade. Even if you don't have an instant, the next spell you cast will have cascade twice, which is still pretty good. Just keep in mind that these three effects won't necessarily stack together. If any of them trigger together, you would get two additional combat steps, but you'd get both untap effects right away, meaning most of your creatures would be tapped and unable to attack in the second extra combat. You can get around this if you have Aurelia, the Warleader alongside either of the others, because she only triggers when she attacks. Just wait to attack with her until the extra combat step.

Speaking of Akki Battle Squad, let's include a few more ways to take advantage of +1/+1 counters. In consideration of our mana curve, I'm skipping over Inexorable Tide for Flux Channeler. We're going to be casting a lot of spells, which will make our creatures larger faster. TARDIS might not deal commander damage, but it can still win the game, and just in case flying isn't enough evasion, Herald of Secret Streams makes sure our creatures with counters can't be blocked at all. Finally, Virtue of Loyalty is an independent source of +1/+1 counters that also untaps our creatures, so we can play offense and defense at the same time.

Reviewing the Basics

I normally don't mention the basic draw, ramp, and removal spells, but I made some more unique decisions for this deck to account for cascade. Most notably, I'm including several mana rocks that cost four. This hopefully gives us a higher density of decently high mana value spells to cascade from, but they also feel better to cascade into, and with a six-mana commander, you'll always have something to use the extra mana on. I'm also not including any traditional counterspells. Cascading into Negate always feels bad, so Archmage's Charm and Urza's Rebuff are filling those slots. Three blue pips is hard to cast naturally, but cascading into it is much better. The two board wipes in the deck sit near the top of the curve for similar reasons, but can be cast for much cheaper when needed.

With all that out of the way, here's the full decklist.

Playing a cascade deck can be a challenge. Keeping track of spells, cards in exile versus in hand, and managing all your triggers at the same time is a lot, but it's also a lot of fun, and this deck captures that perfectly. I purposefully left out any effects that stack your top cards, but you can still aim for certain cards by choosing which card you cascade from carefully, and keeping the effect truly random really captures The Doctor's and TARDIS's sense of adventure.

But how would you build around The First Doctor? What companion would you choose? Let me know in the comments, and thanks for reading!