Princess Twilight Sparkle Commander Deck
When you play Magic, everyone wants to win. This deck can do that without being selfish. Because Friendship is Magic. I’ll show you how it does that in a moment, but first you want to know what a hug deck does.
A hug deck is designed to help the other players in the game. Most of the time it helps them before it helps you. In a casual game, this instantly makes you everyone’s friend. When you are helping them get what they want, you aren’t the target. And some players may even protect you. There are some strange cards you may have never seen that are in this deck. Most people wouldn’t even think they are good. When we built the deck we used mostly cards that we had but did spend about $25 on extra cards we needed.
So what does Princess Twilight Sparkle do? She is one of 3 special cards that were available as a set in November of 2019. It was part of a charity drive that Wizards of the Coast did for Extra Life benefitting the Seattle Children’s Hospital. The other two cards are Nightmare Moon and Rarity. Both of them are in the deck and are helpful, but they aren’t the focus of the deck. Princess Twilight Sparkle is the Commander and she is the focus.
Princess Twilight Sparkle gives all Alicorns, Pegasus, Horses, Unicorns and Ponies +1/+1. An Alicorn is a Unicorn and Pegasus in one pony. Basically a flying unicorn. Twilight Sparkle is a 2 drop for a blue and a white with flying. She also has a special win condition for one of each color mana, if you have all 5 of her friends everyone wins the game.
But there’s a problem, there is only one of her friends in the set and the other 4 haven’t been made yet. So I’ll show you how you can make those ponies and trigger the win for everyone. But since Twilight Sparkle has one of each mana color on the card, she is a 5 color commander. The way we built this deck, we use all 5 colors, but we use more green, white and blue.
This deck has a lot of mana ramp, a lot of card draw and some life gain. It’s not designed to win on its own, but to give everyone a lot of cards and mana too. To make the game more interesting. But we do have a few things that can overwhelm someone that doesn’t want to play nice in the pod.
These are the Retaliator Griffin, Storm Herd and Reins of Power. Retaliator Griffin get’s bigger if you keep getting hit. With the life gain in this deck, I have used Storm Herd to bring out a lot Pegasi and with other anthems on the battlefield these have been at least 5/5s. But Reins of Power is a card that most people don’t expect. It can turn the game really quick.
But that’s not what I want to do to win the game. I want everyone to win and in order to do that, we need a special card from Unhinged named _____. This is a 2 drop 1/1 shapeshifter that can change it’s name or flavor text. Changing the flavor text doesn’t make sense, but changing its name to be the name of the other ponies works. The down side is you need to have for or five of them on the field. So we have to make token copies. We have several ways to do that using Tempt with Reflections, Progenitor Mimic and Rite of Replication. The most reliable card is Rite of Replication. But I have used Tempt with Reflections a few times to make the extra tokens I need.
With the tokens and Twilight Sparkle on the field, all I need is nine to ten open mana and everyone wins. I have done this many times, both with and without the help of other players.
But to get to this point we have to make everyone like us and help them get the things they want. When we start out the game we bring out a lot of creatures. Most of them are very low power, but they fit our theme of horses, unicorns and pegasi. I don’t attack with the creatures. They are there for defense, some lifelink, and mana fixing.
The Capashen Unicorn and Ronom Unicorn can remove artifacts and enchantments that can become a problem. The Mesa Unicorn and Zebra Unicorn have lifelink. The Opaline Unicorn will do some mana fixing, and the Boreas Charger will sometimes get us some extra lands when it dies. And finally the Workhorse will give us at least 4 colorless mana to use.
But we also have some hug creatures that give everyone some advantage. The Plated Pegasus will prevent one damage to each creature or player for each spell. The Akroan Horse is a creature that you give to an opponent and at the beginning of their upkeep, everyone else makes a 1/1 soldier token. And Wishmonger allows anyone to pay 2 mana to give any creature protection from a color. You may think that this will stall a game, but it gives you time to get your ponies out.
We have several other creatures that help us. The Inspiring Unicorn gives other attacking creatures +1/+1. The Loyal Unicorn prevents all combat damage on our creatures if our commander is out. And the Spitemare, which isn’t actually a horse, will return damage to a creature or player when it’s dealt damage. I think the Spitemare should be a horse.
We have a few big creatures. The Crested Sunmare gives horses Indestructible, but can make an extra horse when we gain life. The Gravewaker can bring back a creature from the graveyard to the battlefield tapped. The Thundermare has haste and taps all of our opponents creatures when it enters the battlefield. The Tyrant of Discord destroys opponents permanents at random and can destroy a lot more. And Celestial Force can gain us a lot of life because it’s three life on each players upkeep.
That’s a lot of creatures and they do a lot of cool things. But we have need for more than creatures in this deck. One is card draw. We have so many ways to draw cards. There’s enough to mill out an opponent. And in one game, that did happen…. accidentally. These are the card draw spells.
The Walking Archive lets everyone draw a card during their upkeep for each +1/+1 counter on it. Howling Mine, Dictate of Kruphix and Rites of Flourishing let everyone draw an extra card at the beginning of their draw step. Additionally Rites of Flourishing lets each player play an extra land each turn. We also have the Ghirapur Orrery that will let players play an extra land each turn and if they don’t have any cards in hand at the beginning of their upkeep they draw 3 cards before their draw step.
There was one game where I had enough card draw out so everyone drew 5 extra cards on their turn. They tried to cast everything that they could. But most still had to discard down to 7 at the end of their turn.
Is that enough card draw? No it’s not. The Horn of Greed makes a player draw a card whenever they play a land. The Temple Bell when tapped makes everyone draw a card. The Geier Reach Sanitarium can be activated for added card draw for everyone. And the Pendant of Prosperity is an interesting card that you give to an opponent. Whenever they use it, they draw a card and can play an extra land. And then you can do the same.
But that’s not all. The best card draw in the deck is Minds Aglow. Everyone can help with this. Each mana that’s added to Minds Aglow makes everyone draw that many extra cards. In one game I had an opponent accidentally add enough extra mana, to mill himself out. Oops!
We have a few ways to make sure we don’t have to discard the cards we draw with Reliquary Tower and Venser’s Journal.
Even though we have cards like Cultivate and Kodama’s Reach to get us some extra land, we also want to have everyone able to play extra land and get creatures they want. These are Collective Voyage, Tempt with Discovery and Weird Harvest. Collective Voyage and Tempt with Discovery lets everyone help to get more land on the battlefield. Weird Harvest lets everyone get a creature or two that they want. I generally don’t make X more than 2 because most of the time I use this to find _____ for my hand.
There are times that by turn 4 everyone has eight or nine lands on the battlefield. The games go fast when everyone has the resources they need.
But there are some times that there is a player that doesn’t like me helping them and want to attack me. So there are a few ways to deal with attacks. I use counter spells like Arcane Denial so I can counter their spell in a nice way so they can draw a card. Oblation will put a nonland permanent back into an opponent’s library and they get to draw two cards.
Swords to Plowshares exiles their big creature so they can gain life. Imprisoned in the Moon can enchant a creature, land or Planeswalker and turn it into a colorless mana source for them. I want to make sure that they get as much as they can, when I need to remove something.
That’s most of the cards in the deck. You can find a link to my current decklist in the description. There are some other cool links in the description too.
I know the big question is, how often can I do Princess Twilight Sparkle’s alternate win condition? My dad has tracked that and says I’ve done it 65% of the time so far. This might be high because it’s a very different deck. And there are a lot of players that get really excited when I get close, so they may not be playing their best. But it is a lot of fun to play.
I know another question is, do people complain about the silver border cards? So far no one has said anything about them. I think most people see that the card is real and think that it’s legal. I’m not a competitive player and most everyone knows that. I like playing and having fun. And these cards, just make the game fun.
And the last question, have I won a game by myself? Yes, but only two times. The first was against a person that wiped the board and took out the other two opponents and was going to attack me on their next turn. On my turn I cast Reins of Power and won the game with their creatures.
The second time was a game where I had gained a lot of life with Celestial Force. I couldn’t get any of my hug stuff to work. So I made 86 pegasi with Storm Herd. I had Princess Twilight Sparkle and Collective Blessing on the battlefield. So that was 86 5/5 flying horses.
