(The Dalek Emperor | Art by Mark Tedin)

Technically Playable - The Dalek Emperor

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

The random button seems to really love Universes Beyond between Fangorn, Tree Shepherd, Gluntch, the Bestower and Sarah Jane Smith.

Now we have The Dalek Emperor, one of my favorite Doctor Who villains, is a deck that has been brewing in the back of my mind for a while and it has amazing art from the legendary Mark Tedin. So if I get a little weird in this article I'm sorry, I'm trying to be normal about this one.

Exterminate!

The key card in this deck is definitely the Dalek token, but sadly we can't actually put those into the deck, so how can we work around this token to bring The Dalek Emperor's greatness to the rest of the universe? The first step is to look at how we can get The Dalek Emperor into play as soon as possible.

Dalek Drone is a one off removal spell that reduces the cost of our commander but it only reduces the cost by one mana while Genesis of the Daleks gives us a huge six Daleks and then either drains the whole table or destroys any non-Dalek creatures in play.

But this is pretty small time, we want to always be able to play The Dalek Emperor for two mana. One way to do this is with Myriad, luckily the Doctor Who Commander decks have us covered. Cybermen Squadron is a great option because it allows you to make copies of any artifact creatures that you have, including your Dalek tokens.

We can also use Dalek Squadron to give us more Daleks every turn for a low cost. The issue with Myriad is that the tokens are exiled at the end of combat. To get around that we can use The Master, Multiplied to prevent the trigger that exiles the tokens from removing them. That means we can build up our board exponentially quickly with Cybermen Squadron.

Once The Dalek Emperor is in play we can continue to build up our army further. Roaming Throne is an obvious option since it will double up any of the triggers from The Dalek Emperor (with the side effect of also doubling our Dalek's Myriad triggers and Dalek Drone's removal) meaning we can force our opponents to make the villainous choice twice giving us a maximum of six Daleks.

As well as the Roaming Throne we can also take advantage of the fact that the trigger happens at the beginning of combat allowing us to abuse additional combat steps to get even more villainous choices.

One of the best cards for this is definitely Bloodthirster as it can attack each of your opponents giving you a total of three combat steps in a turn giving you a maximum of nine Daleks that turn without any additional trigger effects.

Breath of Fury also works fantastically with The Dalek Emperor because you can leverage the menace on the tokens to guarantee they connect to give you another combat step for more Daleks, this can also work as a semi-infinite combo as long as your opponents can't block the Daleks.

But more Daleks aren't the only benefit we can get from all of these extra combat steps, Determined Iteration and the new Standard all-star Urabrask's Forge are both fantastic options too.

Since these both remove their creature tokens at the end of the turn they can participate in any extra combat steps that you take, the Urabrask's Forge token in particular is a fantastic option to enchant with Breath of Fury because it has trample which makes it much easier to get the combat damage through.

These both also work amazingly well with The Master, Multiplied since they can't be sacrificed or exiled to their own effects giving you more tokens that you normally wouldn't be able to keep to help build up your board.

Once we have our Dalek army it's time to conquer the universe with it. But a bunch of 3/3s aren't the most potent force in the world, so we need to find some ways to make sure they can get through to their target. Ikoria can help us here thanks to its keyword-matters theme. One of these keywords was menace.

This gave us two cards that are going to be key in closing our games, Labyrinth Raptor and Sonorous Howlbonder. Sonorous Howlbonder is a pretty simple card, turning menace into "super-Menace" requiring three creatures to block instead of the two that menace needs, this means our Dalek tokens or any other creatures with menace are much more likely to be able to attack without the threat of blocks.

Additionally, this allows the creature that is enchanted with Breath of Fury to almost guarantee to be able to get through to deal combat damage. Labyrinth Raptor on the other hand has an activated ability that allows us to pump the power of all of our creatures with menace.

Labyrinth Raptor also forces opponents to sacrifice one of the two (or more) creatures that block our menace creatures, this both thins out our opponent's boards to help get our other menace creatures through while also setting up more sacrifice synergy which I'm going to talk about a little more later.

EXTERMINAAAATE!

I've focused mostly on the Dalek element of The Dalek Emperor but the other thing the Daleks are well known for is their obsession with purging the universe of anything non-Dalek, which is the origin of their shrill battle cry "Exterminate!" To represent this I'm going to cover some cards that are good with the sacrifice theme I mentioned above as well as some of the better removal that may be worth running with The Dalek Emperor.

Just a warning though, some of these cards are not necessarily considered particularly "fun" to play against, so add them to your deck at your own risk.

The cards that immediately come to mind for me when I hear "Exterminate!" are definitely board wipes, and there are some really powerful ones for The Dalek Emperor. The best board wipes are one-sided so I'd definitely have to run Kindred Dominance (naming Dalek) and Their Name Is Death because the chances of other people having any Daleks is pretty low.

If other people do have artifact creatures when I play Their Name Is Death, the chances of them having a board as good as mine is fairly low unless they're playing an artifact-centric deck. In that case, you can always hold off on casting the spell until it's an advantageous position for you.

As well as these though I also like to run what I consider to be "utility" board wipes. Blood Money is a really good one that lets you clear the board and then prepare the mana for a really big turn afterward. Similarly, if you have enough mana but are feeling like you're running low on cards Decree of Pain is a costly but very powerful board wipe that also has an uncounterable instant-speed alternative when you cycle it.

Lastly, a board wipe that I've seen more and really want to try in my The Beast, Deathless Prince deck is Heartless Conscription. Since it exiles it gets around any frustrating indestructible effects and while it doesn't give you mana or cards like the others do, it does let you play your opponent's creatures which can often give you the utility you might not otherwise have in black and red such as Eternal Witness or Snapcaster Mage effects.

But this is just for starters, a lot of people neglect board wipes and I just wanted to share my two cents on the ones I'd play in this deck. The main event is how we can leverage the powerful sacrifice effect that The Dalek Emperor has, in case our opponents don't want to give us more Daleks. There are tons of options but since getting back to face-to-face magic in the last few years since they returned post-covid I've become more and more of a fan of theft decks, I just like the idea of getting to play all of the other cool cards people have brought along with them!

The obvious options (and the ones I was really talking about when I said they're probably not super fun) are Tergrid, God of Fright, and her more vintage counterpart It That Betrays. These make the villainous choice of sacrificing a creature or giving us more Daleks even more villainous by adding to it the fact that any sacrificed creature would then become part of the Dalek master plan.

What these cards probably do nine times out of ten is just guarantee that we will get Daleks from The Dalek Emperor, or they will alternatively become a lightning rod for removal that could otherwise be directed at our commander. These are both decent reasons to play these cards, but ultimately they will also make you a target of a lot of hate, so if you're playing them be ready to throw down with your pod.

If you want an alternative to these two that might draw less ire, you can also use Nazgûl Battle-Mace. Not only is it the same cost as Tergrid but also requires it to be equipped to get the effect which can be negated by ann opponents paying three life (think Athreos, God of Passage).

You can also run Portal to Phyrexia for a similar effect. This is probably one of the more fair versions of this effect for this deck in particular since it has a high cost and based on the other cards needed to make this deck run there is much less room to play ways to loop and abuse it, maybe you could run Goblin Welder or Daretti, Scrap Savant but realistically they don't help with much else of your gameplan so may not be worth running.

Duskmourn has also given us some really spicy cards for this strategy. Meathook Massacre II and Valgavoth, Terror Eater are amazing options because they act as much fairer versions of Tergrid and It That Betrays giving you access to the ability to steal your opponent's creatures when they die but not making yourself public enemy number one.

As well as bringing creatures back these cards both of these cards can act as ways to remove opponents' creatures (or other nonland permanents in the case of Valgavoth's ward) allowing them to fuel their own theft strategies.

The main issue with these cards is the life cost so you need to be careful and ensure you are only stealing what you need, you don't want to get caught by a stray Lightning Bolt because you got greedy.

As with all Technically Playable articles, this was a very quick look at The Dalek Emperor as a commander, and a few of the cards that can really make a deck with The Dalek Emperor as the commander tick. Let me know in the comments below if you play The Dalek Emperor, if you want to build a The Dalek Emperor deck, or even if you just enjoyed this article!

---

Read more: