Vintage 1994 Doctor Who Daleks & Davros Foil Card Set 🧬 Cards 1-3 and 7

🧬 The Daleks and Their Creator, Together in Foil — 1994 Cornerstone Doctor Who

What if you could hold the entire origin story of Doctor Who's most famous monster in a single set of cards? This is the 1994 Cornerstone Communications Daleks & Davros foil grouping — officially licensed by the BBC — pairing the three Daleks foil inserts (Cards 1, 2 and 3) with the separately issued Davros foil (Card 7). Everything described here is read straight from the cards themselves in the photographs, front and back, including the printed text on their reverses. Four foil cards, but one complete idea: the creatures, and the man who dreamed them up. For a Doctor Who collector, this is the villain's whole arc — conception to execution — gathered on shining, foil-bordered stock and kept exactly as it left the factory.

🤖 The Three Daleks Foils (Cards 1–3)

Cards 1 through 3 feature the Daleks, and they are true foil inserts — the cards that were randomly seeded into sealed factory packs of Cornerstone's base Doctor Who series, not part of the standard run. Each one carries a reflective foil finish that throws the light and frames the Daleks against vividly marbled borders, a different colour on every card. Held together, the three fronts move like a little gallery of Dalek imagery.

The first (Foil 1) shows a lone Dalek gliding along a riverside walkway beside a footbridge, its dome and eyestalk caught in profile against the water, set into a cool blue-and-purple marbled border. The second (Foil 2) is the image every Doctor Who fan knows — a line of Daleks crossing Westminster Bridge with the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben rising behind them, wrapped in a fiery orange-and-red marbled border. The third (Foil 3) massed a group of Daleks together in an indoor control-room scene, eyestalks and manipulator arms bristling, ringed in a deep green marbled border. Each front carries the "DALEKS!" wordmark, the Cornerstone monogram, and the licensed Doctor Who diamond logo.

📇 Read the Reverses — a Compact History of the Daleks

What lifts these three cards above ordinary inserts is what is printed on the back of each one. Cornerstone used the Daleks foils to tell the making-of story in three chapters, and the photographs show every word.

Foil 1 — "Operators of the Daleks." This reverse honours the people who are almost never seen: the actors who worked hidden inside the Dalek casings and the artists who supplied their voices. It singles out John Scott Martin, one of the most prolific Dalek operators, who worked across the classic series, alongside other long-serving operators and the distinctive voice artists who gave the Daleks their grating, staccato menace. It is a quiet tribute to a kind of performance the audience only ever heard and never saw.

Foil 2 — "Designer of the Daleks." This one credits Raymond P. Cusick, the BBC designer who turned Terry Nation's script description into a real, buildable object. The card explains how Cusick arrived at the enclosed "pepperpot" form — a shape that let an operator sit fully hidden inside, with neither wheels nor legs on show — working from a sketch reminiscent of a pepperpot or a salt cellar, and refining it into the prototype for every Dalek that followed across the mid-1960s.

Foil 3 — "Creator of the Daleks." The third reverse belongs to writer Terry Nation, the man who invented them. It tells how Nation, who began as a comedy writer and later created the cult series Blake's 7, devised the Daleks for only the second Doctor Who adventure ever made — a serial originally titled "The Mutants" and now simply remembered as "The Daleks." That story made the creatures an overnight phenomenon, and the card notes how Nation returned to them again and again, eventually introducing his own personal favourite creation: Davros, the scientist who built them.

Read in sequence, the three backs are a genuine three-part essay on how the Daleks came to be — the hidden performers, the designer, and the writer — which is exactly why these particular three foils belong together.

🧬 The Davros Card (Card 7) — the Direct-Order Foil

Card 7 is the piece that completes the thought. It features Davros, the malevolent scientist who created the Daleks, seated in his familiar life-support throne among his creations, against a green-and-purple marbled foil border and the bold "DAVROS!" wordmark. And it did not come from a pack. Unlike the Daleks and Cybermen foils, the Davros card was issued only as a direct-order specialty release — sent to collectors who ordered the full set straight from Cornerstone — and was never seeded into sealed packs at all.

Its reverse is the card collectors prize most: the printed "Davros Times Three" checklist, a compact reference tracing Davros's television appearances and the three actors who have played him. The card lists Michael Wisher, who originated the role in 1975's "Genesis of the Daleks"; David Gooderson, who took the part in 1979's "Destiny of the Daleks"; and Terry Molloy, who carried Davros through all three of the 1980s stories — "Resurrection," "Revelation," and "Remembrance" of the Daleks — ultimately playing the character opposite three different Doctors. That single reverse turns a character card into a documented artifact of Doctor Who continuity, and pairing it here with the three Daleks foils closes the loop: the monsters, the men who made them, and the man who made the monsters.

🔎 What This Set Is — and What It Isn't

We want you to know exactly what you are getting, because Cornerstone's foil program is easy to misread. The full 1994 foil program ran to seven cards: three Daleks foils, three Cybermen foils, and the one direct-order Davros foil. This set is four of those seven — the three Daleks foils (Cards 1–3) and the Davros foil (Card 7). It does not include the three Cybermen foils (Cards 4–6).

That is a deliberate grouping, not a shortfall. Where the complete seven-card set is about owning the entire program, this Daleks & Davros set is about a single, self-contained story — the Daleks and the scientist who created them — with the Cybermen, a wholly separate monster with their own origin, left out. If you specifically want the Cybermen foils as well, the complete seven-card set is the one to seek. If what draws you is the Daleks' own arc, from the hidden operators to the designer to the creator and finally to Davros himself, this is the tighter, more focused set, and it stands on its own.

🏭 Cornerstone Communications and BBC-Licensed Quality

Cornerstone Communications' Doctor Who cards of the early-to-mid 1990s are well regarded by collectors for their physical quality, and these foils show why. They were produced on thick, rigid card stock, with clean, well-bonded foil that resists the flaking, bubbling and dulling seen in cheaper foil programs of the period. Printing and registration are sharp, with strong contrast and crisp, legible text on the reverses. The licensing is printed right on the cards: the copyright lines credit 1994 Cornerstone Communications, the Doctor Who diamond logo licensed from BBC Enterprises, and the Daleks and Davros to their creator, Terry Nation. These are the marks of an authorised, professionally made product, and they are visible in the photographs for you to read yourself.

📦 Condition & Preservation

All four cards in this set are New Old Stock — taken from original factory sources and never circulated. They remain pack-fresh: clean surfaces, sharp corners, and intact, un-flaked foil finishes on every card, fronts and backs alike. Foil cards of this age are easily scuffed or dulled the moment they are handled, so an uncirculated grouping like this — the fragile direct-order Davros card kept in the same fresh state as the inserts — sits at the top of the condition range for the program. As always, please look closely at every photograph, since they show each front and each back and form part of the description.

👾 Why the Daleks Still Matter

The Daleks arrived in only the second Doctor Who serial ever broadcast, at the very end of 1963, and became an instant sensation — the "Dalekmania" that fixed Doctor Who in popular culture and made the Daleks its most enduring adversaries. Everything that followed, right through to the modern series, traces back to that first appearance and to the handful of people this set's cards celebrate. Terry Nation devised the creatures and later created Blake's 7; Raymond Cusick gave them the enclosed form that let an operator vanish inside; and the operators and voice artists gave them movement and that unmistakable voice. Davros, arriving in 1975's "Genesis of the Daleks," supplied the missing origin — a creator for the creatures. To own the three Daleks foils and the Davros card together is to own that whole chain of invention in one small, gleaming set.

🏛️ Collecting Significance

• 🔹 Four original 1994 Cornerstone foil cards: the three Daleks foils (Cards 1–3) plus the direct-order Davros foil (Card 7).
• 🔹 Two distribution formats in one set — pack-only foil inserts alongside the direct-order card that never came from a pack.
• 🔹 Printed reverses that credit the operators, the designer and the creator of the Daleks, plus the "Davros Times Three" actor checklist.
• 🔹 A focused Daleks-and-Davros narrative — the complete villain origin without the separate Cybermen storyline.
• 🔹 BBC-licensed, Cornerstone-made, and preserved as uncirculated New Old Stock.

For the collector who loves the Daleks specifically — their look, their history, and the mind that created them — this Daleks & Davros foil set is the story told end to end, on four cards made to last and kept exactly as they were meant to be kept.