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Long-time trading card game (TCG) players know that the real magic isn’t in the cards, it’s in the gathering. Like all other TCGs,Magic: The Gatheringis a social game, best played with friends or in a pod, and as we all know, Friendship Is Magic.
Equestria may not be a plane in the cosmology of Magic: The Gathering, but the Mane Six (plus Princess Luna and Discord) are available thanks to the Ponies: The Galloping secret lairs. With a little bit of effort, you can pull off the ultimate group hug feat: making everypony win at the same time!
The Commander
Twilight Sparkle isthe primary protagonist for the first couple of seasons of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magicbefore the series branched out to give the rest of the Mane Six more time to shine. Originally a Unicorn, in card form we find her transformed into an Alicorn, a creature with both the magical horn of a Unicorn and the wings of a Pegasus.
“The Mane Six” refers to the six primary characters from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic: Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, Rarity, and Rainbow Dash.
Princess Twilight Sparkle is a 2/2 Alicorn with flying that costs one white and one blue mana. She’s a lord for all the common creatures of Equestria,giving other Alicorns, Horses, Pegasi, Ponies, and Unicorns a +1/+1 passive bonus, allowing you to use her to lead a basic “Pony kindred” deck.
Her final ability is unique in over thirty years of Magic: if you control each member of the Mane Six, you canpay one mana of every color to make every pony win the game. While there are several ways to make everybody lose the game or force a draw, this ability is the only way to make everybody at the table win.
Pulling off this feat can be tough:You need six legendary creatures in play simultaneously, plus one mana of every color available. They’re all reasonably inexpensive, but a single Swords to Plowshares can exile one of your key players, leaving you unable to assemble all the Elements of Harmony.
Princess Twilight Sparkle and the rest of the cards printed in the Ponies: The Galloping and Ponies: The Galloping 2 Secret Lairs are silver-bordered, andnot legal for tournament play, so there are no rules concerning how her ability would work in a tournament environment. Be sure to have a Rule Zero discussion with the rest of your group before playing Twilight Sparkle or any other silver-ordered or acorn-stamped card.
Sample Decklist
Five-color decks can face the challenge of staying on-task since you’ll likely be tempted to add all the best cards of each color.It’s often easiest to build with a theme in mind. For this decklist we focused on both of Princess Twilight Sparkle’s effects, focusing on creatures that she buffs and ways to get the rest of the Mane Siz into play.
Helm of the Host
Imprisoned in the Moon
Rising of the Day
Windbrisk Heights
Zagoth Triome
Not all silver-bordered cards are well received, and focusing on them can make the game too silly for many players. This decklist uses only seven silver-bordered cards, most of which represent the Mane Six.
Building The Deck
Princess Twilight Sparkle and the rest ofthe Mane Six introduce a lot of unusual options and challenges to deckbuilding: each character cares about something different, with little overlap. Pinkie Pie looks for smiles in art and party effects, Princess Twilight Sparkle cares about creature types, Rainbow Dash looks for haste and flying, Rarity and Applejack care about toys, and Fluttershy looks for tails.
Any one of these effects could be built around individually, but good luck with building a deck full of smiling Pegasi with party synergies. You’ll want topick one or two themesand pick up other synergies where they’re available, such as searching for alternate prints of staple cards with smiling artwork.
Princess Twilight Sparkle’s color identity allows you to use every color, but all members of the Mane Six are white and one other color, none of them including black. Five-color decks can easily turn into goodstuff piles, functioning almost the same despite having access to all 30,000+ cards in Magic’s history. Minimizing one color can help offset this tendency, and this guide will make minimal use of black.
There are far better commanders for five-color goodstuff decks, sothe focus should be on reaching that unique “everypony wins” result. This will result in a lower power deck suitable for the type of casual pods that will allow silver-bordered commanders, while also leading to a unique game experience for everyone involved.
Ramp
Princess Twilight Sparkle has a five-color identity, giving you access to nearly 30,000 unique spells across over 30 years of Magic history. This means thatyou have access to all of green’s land ramp, white’s catch-up and taxes, red and black’s rituals, and tons of mana artifacts.
One trick that people use to simplify building five-color decks is tofocus on green, giving you access to tons of spells that fetch lands from your library either into your hand or directly into play. This allows you todig up any other mana-producing land you need when you need itinstead of hoping to draw the right one.
Cards that search for a specific land type, such as Nature’s Lore and Three Wishes, are particularly valuable because they don’t specify that the land needs to be basic. Thisgives you access to dual lands and triomes, which can even come into play untapped if you meet the requirements.
Tempt with Discovery is a flavorful ramp spell for Twilight Sparkle: for three colorless and one green mana, you get to search your library for any land and put it into play. Then each of your opponents may do the same, and each time an opponent does, you get to find and play another land.This can net you four lands, plus giving each opponent a single land.
White offers additional ramp options, most notably Smothering Tithe. Smothering Tithe allows you tocreate a Treasure token each time an opponent draws a cardunless they pay two generic mana. Twilight Sparkle is thematic for a “group hug” deck, which means that you’re going to give your opponents a lot of opportunities to draw cards and yourself a lot of opportunities to get Treasure.
Draw
Blue and black both offer excellent card draw options, such as Rhystic Study and Necropotence, butconsider sharing the lovewith your opponents. Howling Mine, once a staple of commander decks,gives each player an extra card during their draw phase. It only works while untapped, though, so if you want to turn it off for your opponents, you can include some effects that allow you to tap artifacts.
Temple Bell can be tapped tohave each player draw a card, and Kwain, Itinerant Meddler can do the same while also giving everyone a little life gain. Despite not being a Pony or other Equestrian, he fits right in as a proxy for Fluttershy’s pet rabbit, Angel Bunny. The Bloomburrow Commander print also clearly features smiling characters, which Pinkie Pie will appreciate.
Walking Archive provides you with some protection in the form of a growing blocker that your opponents won’t want to kill becausethe bigger it gets, the more cards everybody gets to drawfor free. And any time you have extra mana you’re able to pump it up a little more. Just pretend it’s Twilight Sparkle’s library home.
Group Hug
The first lesson Twilight Sparkle had to learn was to work together with her friends. Including plenty of cooperative and group hug elements in your deck will allow you to share that lesson with your pod.
Minds Aglow is a perfect representation of working together. You pay one blue mana, then any amount of additional mana, and allow everyone else at the table to chip in. Then each player draws one card for each mana spent after your first, sosmall contributions will lead to everyone drawing a lot of cards.
Intellectual Offering gives you a little room to bargain: you’re able to have one opponent draw three cards and untap all of their nonland permanents, or have one opponent draw and another untap.Either way, you’ll get both benefits.
Passive effects like the one provided by Ghirapur Orrery or Rites of Flourishing will speed up the game,providing all players with additional draws and the opportunity to play an additional land each turn. Since you’ll be the last player to get the extra draws, verify that you hold them until you have an extra land in hand so that you can capitalize on that effect.
To hit Twilight Sparkle’s win condition, you’ll need to search for a couple of other Ponies. It isn’t uncommon for players to roll their eyes at tutors, but everybody is happy to get a free tutor themselves! Weird Harvest allows you tosearch for any number of creaturesas long as you have the mana, but everyone else gets the same benefit.
Don’t forget to include a little protection for yourself! Plated Pegasus and Benevolent Unicorn eachprevent a little bit of damage from spells, which can be the difference between life or death for both permanents and players.Theseapply to all creatures, planeswalkers, and players, so everyone at the table will benefit from this layer of protection.
Everypony Else
Each member of the Mane Six brings something different to the table, and while it isn’t feasible to use all six to maximum effect, you can certainly get some value out of each.
Since Rarity and Applejack both care about toys, you may want tobuild a small toy chest to go along with your deck. Rarity allows you to reveal a My Little Pony toy to give a creature protection from every color in that toy’s mane, tail, and clothes. If you don’t want to carry a whole collection,look for a Rainbow Dash Equestria Girls toy, several of which feature all five colors.
We recommend the Equestria Girls Mini Figurines Rainbow Dash, which includes all five colors and is very compact for easy transport.
Applejack turns your toys into token creatureswith the names, colors, and creature types of your toys, as well as the presence or absence of wings and horns. This is the only way to get Princess Celestia into play: most Princess Celestia toys would be white Alicorns named “Princess Celestia” with flying that lets you scry two when they come into play.
Applejack’s tokens aren’t limited to My Little Pony toys, so you canuse them to add Batman, Lego, and Pokemon to your Magic game.
There was a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic TCG, so you’re able to take a stack of cards to use as tokens if you’re ready to argue that cards are toys.
Applejack also offersan alternate way to satisfy Princess Twilight Sparkle’s win condition:toy figures of members of the Mane Six will have the characters' names, allowing you to have everypony win while only controlling two cards featuring the named characters.
Everypony is important, butRainbow Dash gives access to all five colors of manaif you’re cool enough. Not only can this supercharge your deck, it also allows you to tap Rainbow Dash to win the game as soon as your last Pony is in play. Because of this, you’ll want to include several creatures with flying or haste or ways to give them those abilities.
While Rainbow Dash is in play,each time you attack with a creature that has flying or haste, you get 20 percent cooler. At any time you’re at least 100 percent cool,you’re able to tap Rainbow Dash to gain one mana of every color, and then you reset your coolnessto zero. The trigger happens for each creature, so you can reach 100 percent coolness in a single combat with five creatures with flying or haste.
Pinkie Pie allows you to count every creature you control as part of your party, allowing you to ignore the normal four-member and creature type restrictions. None of the party effects are particularly good, usually reducing costs by one generic mana for each member of your party, and normally capped at four by the spell cost itself.
Pinkie Pie has another ability, though:Any time you cast a spell where the art shows a smile, you get a tapped Treasuretoken. Alternate art can be found on many staples that feature someone smiling, such as the Lord of the Rings print of Cultivate or the borderless Fallout print of Arcane Signet, allowing you to retain the normal functionality of the deck while gaining additional ramp from Treasures.
Fluttershy can be used both tobuff a lot of creatures and to lock down one creaturethat presents a threat. For one mana you may tap Fluttershy and put a +1/+1 counter on each creature with a tail controlled by a single player, then “stare down” one creature. A creature that you’re staring down can’t attack or block as long as you’re looking at it, so you can prevent a big creature from attacking or a creature with deathtouch from blocking.
Fluttershy works really well with Princess Twilight Sparkle, since most Ponies, Alicorns, Pegasi, Horses, and Unicorns have tails, allowing you to buff your entire board if you build for Twilight Sparkle’s kindred ability.
If any of your important Ponies are exiled or otherwise unable to be played, _____ provides a backup plan. For one mana you canchange its name to that of your missing mare, and sincethe name is all Princess Twilight Sparkle cares about, you’ll be able to pull off a win. The decklist also includes a couple ways to clone this Shapeshifter, in case you need to pull off the same trick more than once.
