Magic The Gathering Universes Beyond Doctor Who: Explaining The New Sagas (EMBARGO UNTIL 3RD OCTOBER)

We've already explained what Sagas are in Magic The Gathering and how they work. They're a newer type of enchantment with multiple different effects that try to tell a story through how you play them. There are a lot of them now, but we've got the details on one of the upcoming Doctor Who Universes Beyond Sagas, and we're also going to explain the significance of it (and indeed, of every Saga because they're all themed).

Magic The Gathering Universes Beyond Doctor Who Sagas Explained

The above card, Parting Of The Ways, is one of the brand new Sagas that are being printed in the upcoming Doctor Who Universes Beyond. It's based on the final episode of Christopher Eccleston's tenure as The Doctor, 2005's The Parting Of The Ways, which featured the Ninth Doctor up against the Daleks with seemingly insurmountable odds stacked against him.

Each effect represents a moment in the episode. For example, the second effect that tells you to time travel twice is in direct reference to the Doctor sending Rose home in the TARDIS before she manages to get back to him by breaking in. The effect afterward represents Rose absorbing the Eye of the TARDIS in order to become the Bad Wolf and save the Doctor:

"For each opponent, destroy up to one target artifact that player controls"

Each Saga in this set represents an episode of the Television Series and shows what happened in that episode, with episodes such as The Girl In The Fireplace, Flux, City of Death, and more receiving the treatment. City of Death is an especially fun one, as it directly links to a key plot point in the episode about several fake copies of the Mona Lisa being made. The card first creates a treasure token, and then makes a copy of a target non-saga token you control for the next five turns, since there are six different fake copies of the Mona Lisa in the episode itself.

There's a lot of other Saga cards to discover as you collect everything from the Magic The Gathering Universes Beyond Doctor Who set, such as The Trial of a Time Lord, The Caves of Androzani and a lot more that we don't have space for here, but all of them represent a specific moment of the episode they're based on and are extremely cool for hardcore fans to see.