Technically Playable - Sarah Jane Smith
August 22, 2024 by
Paul Palmer 
(Sarah Jane Smith | Art by Fajareka Setiawan)
Technically Playable - Sarah Jane Smith
Welcome to Technically Playable, where our mission statement is "Every commander is Technically playable" (the best kind of playable). The way this works is every article will have a commander generated using EDHREC's random button, I'll talk through the card and then write about how we can build around it!
This week's random commander is
Just like I did in the article about Alora from the Baldur's Gate set, I'm going to focus on a quick look at three of the most popular partners with Sarah Jane Smith (or Doctors I guess in this case) and talk about a handful of cards for each.
The Fourth Doctor - 735 Decks
The first "partner" I'll be looking at is The Fourth Doctor. This is pretty expected since it's the face commander of this specific precon from the Doctor Who set. That being said, these were the face cards for a reason, and these two legends have a ton of synergy. The Fourth Doctor is all about casting historic cards from the top of your deck to create Food. Sensei's Divining Top makes this trivial while allowing you to draw additional cards, this effectively gives you a guaranteed way to play a historic spell from the top of your deck each turn with the additional benefit of being able to look at the top three cards of your deck and reorganize them in case you want to play one of them from the top of your deck instead.
In a similar vein, Crystal Skull, Isu Spyglass from the latest Universes Beyond set is another fantastic way of doubling up on the kind of effect that The Fourth Doctor gives you but allowing you cast any number of historic spells or play any number of historic lands off the top during one turn.
Historic spells of course relate to anything that is legendary, an artifact, or a Saga. There are some cards in this subsection of MTG that also help us to generate more value. Kellan, the Kid is a phenomenal addition and allows you to play additional cards from your hand (with a lower mana cost, sure) whenever you use The Fourth Doctor's ability to play a historic spell off the top of your deck. This is an amazing amount of value and allows you to effectively two for one each of the cards you cast off the top of your deck. And while The Fourth Doctor is only once per turn Crystal Skull, Isu Spyglass, and even Mystic Forge if you decide to lean into the artifact element of the deck, both allow you to continuously play cards from the top of your deck as long as there is a legal target meaning you can create a huge amount of value to help overwhelm your opponents.
In terms of winning the game, there are a few different routes you can go down with The Fourth Doctor. Urza, Lord High Artificer, and Jaheira, Friend of the Forest give you tons of mana with your food tokens to activate abilities or cast even more spells. I'd recommend using the mana to cast an overloaded Rise and Shine or Cyberdrive Awakener to act as a kind of pseudo-Craterhoof Behemoth, closing out games in one combat step. If you prefer more of a slow roll you can alternatively use something like Rosie Cotton of South Lane to make your creatures huge or even use Displaced Dinosaurs to creature a bunch of 7/7s whenever you cast historic spells from the top of your deck.
The Third Doctor - 400 Decks
While not the face Commander The Third Doctor also came in the precon, which partially explains the number of decks. Equally, this is another pairing that has some good synergy but with a bigger focus on generating tokens (specifically noncreature ones) and using those to help The Third Doctor to deal lethal Commander damage. The Third Doctor is the one that I personally find the funniest, and while I would personally pair him with Dan Lewis to equip a bunch of tokens to him, he also works really well with Sarah Jane Smith.
Right out of the gates, I can tell you the best card in this deck is undoubtedly [/el]Nettlecyst[/el]. Being able to effectively have a copy of Cranial Plating or Cranial Ram in a non-black deck is incredibly powerful and allows you to use the benefits of the ramp and protection that white, blue and black provide combined with the power of a Cranial Plating effect. Additionally, if you focus on artifact tokens the Nettlecyst is doubling up the buffs that each of those tokens gives The Third Doctor. But artifacts aren't the only noncreature tokens you can have.
Yes, Treasures, Clues, Food, and now even maps are the most well-known but Niko Aris also gives you access to shards, enchantment tokens that will also buff The Third Doctor. While you do have to -1 Niko to get one each turn you also create X when you play Niko giving you a great mana sink for the late game. If you decide to go with the strategy of Commander damage you can really surprise some people by using Second Harvest to get sneaky one-shots like an expensive version of Berserk that also gives you additional mana, Food or cards.
The obvious strategy here is to go for Commander damage and to try to get your damage through with evasion from cards like Shadowspear or Trailblazer's Boots but you can also go down the construct route too. Using Thousand Moons Smithy and Karn, Scion of Urza you can create a bunch of creatures that have functionally the same text as your Commander. This gives you some redundancy, and while these won't kill your opponents as quickly as your Commander would (they need to do 40 damage instead of 21) you will still benefit from flooding the board with artifact tokens.
But trying to create one huge creature and win that way isn't the only way to close out games. Just like with The Fourth Doctor, The Third Doctor can also leverage tokens to win the game. Of course, Displaced Dinosaurs is incredibly powerful but if you decide to focus more on specific types of tokens you can also win in other ways. Five Hundred Year Diary allows you to have a huge amount of mana to dump into something like Niko Aris or another X-costed spell while Tangletrove Kelp gives you an alternative to Displaced Dinosaurs that also have some amount of protection from sorcery speed removal. And of course, as with any deck that cares about food, clues, or treasures Academy Manufactor is an automatic inclusion (and it should probably be assumed that all five decks here should have it in the 99 somewhere).
The Sixth Doctor - 131 Decks
The last Bant deck on this list is another partner from the precon but with significantly fewer decks than the previous two. This is mostly because it doesn't have direct synergy with Sarah Jane Smith but instead uses her as a way to help generate a small amount of value when the deck does what it's planning to do: play historic spells.
There are a lot of very cool and unique legendary spells that have effects not really seen or used anywhere else in the game. The Sixth Doctor gives you a fantastic opportunity to double up on not only these spell's effects but also the effects of other historic cards with powerful and unique effects. To flood the board I'd recommend Jedit Ojanen, Mercenary and Alistair, the Brigadier. These synergize with casting a ton of historic spells and allow you to build up a board that you can use to stay alive and eventually overwhelm your opponents when you feel comfortable enough to attack. In combination with these, you can also run Ojer Taq, Deepest Foundation.
Ojer Taq will double up all of the Cats and Soldiers from Jedit and Alistair as well as the copied tokens generated by The Sixth Doctor allowing you to break the Singleton rule of Commander even further. But how will you make sure you have enough historic spells to continue casting and making tokens? Well, legendaries have you covered there too. Reki, the History of Kamigawa is an obvious one, and like the other cards mentioned above gets better and better the more legendary spells you cast as well as fuelling itself further.
There are also legends that combine really well with building a massive board. Toski, Bearer of Secrets and Edric, Spymaster of Trest both reward you for having a ton of creatures in play by allowing you to draw when you deal combat damage. You can use the forest walk on Jedit's cats and the sheer volume of Soldiers from Alistair to get through any boards your opponents have developed to draw more cards. If you decide to focus on legendary creatures as the historic spells you want to cast you can also use Chulane, Teller of Tales, or if you want to focus on the more expensive creatures you can even use Helga, Skittish Seer to act as additional copies of Reki that also allow you to put any lands you draw into play as well.
But legendaries aren't the only historic spells available to us. There are also a ton of powerful artifacts and Sagas we can use. Twinning Staff is probably one of the best cards in this deck. Being able to make two copies of everything you cast is extremely powerful, and if you hold off on casting Twinning Staff until you already have The Sixth Doctor in play you instead get three copies of everything you cast giving you an insurmountable amount of value.
Additionally, if you then cast something like The Immortal Sun, Chimil, the Inner Sun or Portal to Phyrexia you can get even more you of each card you cast and I can't really see anything outside of a Farewell, Cyclonic Rift or an overloaded[/el]Vandalblast[/el] beating that. You can also use Phyrexian Metamorph to give you access to cards you can't play in the colors that The Sixth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith provide you. I can only imagine the looks on my playgroup's faces if I had two copies of Twinning Staff in play and then I played Phyrexian Metamorph to make four copies of Etali, Primal Conqueror (you can also use Phyrexian Metamorph to make copies of Twinning Staff by the way...).
Lastly are Sagas. For me, the best Sagas in this deck are all utility-based. War of the Last Alliance gives you a really powerful tutor that will allow you to search for any of the amazing legendaries that I talked about above while Battle for Bretagard, City of Death and The Eleventh Hour are all really powerful options to create even more copies of your non-legendary historic copies from The Sixth Doctor. But they're not all just for utility, Kiora Bests the Sea God is a really good way to help close out games by creating a huge token (that you can copy with the other sagas I mentioned here), tapping down any blockers and then taking your opponent's best permanent.
This article was a lot of fun to write and looking at all of the Doctor Who cards has even given me ideas for a deck using The Third Doctor and Dan Lewis to do some nonsense. This article also reintroduced me to The Seventh Doctor which I'll also be looking to build something around in conjunction with Clara Oswald (give me a recommendation on a third color to use in this deck, I'm thinking red for Seize the Day).
As with all Technically Playable articles, this was a very quick look at Sarah Jane Smith as a commander, and a few of the cards that can really make a deck with Sarah Jane Smith as the commander tick. Let me know in the comments below if you play Sarah Jane Smith, if you want to build a Sarah Jane Smith deck, or even if you just enjoyed this article!
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Paul Palmer
Hey there, I'm Paul. I've been writing about magic for a really long time. I love to write about obscure commanders (one of my really early articles back in 2015 was about Skeleton Ship) and how you can make decks around them work, no matter how unplayable they are. I love Gruul, I love Mountains and I love casting Lightning Bolt.
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