Next is Decoy from The Target Storybook, the only War Doctor story featured and it’s fairly basic and brief. One thing that downgrades it is having read Engines of War and seeing that it’s the same writer, I couldn’t help noticing just how similarly written the two stories are. As in there are lines and passages that I’d swear George Mann copied and pasted from Engines of War, or at least that’s how it felt reading this. The setup being an attack on a Dalek fleet by an armada of Battle TARDIS led by what is believed to be the Doctor, giving the Time Lord soldiers a heightened sense of courage and determination. Unbeknownst to them that the Doctor is actually an Auton duplicate and the Time Lords are being sent like lambs to the slaughter under the direction of Rassilon in order to lure the Daleks into his own trap, much to the Doctor’s outrage.

Decoy is by no means the same story as Engines of War, it just comes off as similarly written in some parts. The story itself is solid but nothing special, we get little insight into the Nestenes role in the Time War, we get a better description of the Cloister Wraiths from Hell Bent and their true nature, and yet another example of the higher up Time Lords being completely immoral, but nothing you can’t pick up from other Time War stories.

Decoy is a decent War Doctor story, written by George Mann who also wrote Engines of War. Not a lot to say but we have the Doctor being suitably trickish and being, well, the Doctor! Some nice rivalry between him and Rassalon too, a fun 20 page story.

Solid War Doctor Story, not much to say, I liked it a good chunk, but it doesn’t rank as highly as many other Stories from this Collection.