In a very surprising move from Wizards of the Coast, Magic will be releasing a new product called Ponies: The Galloping, as part of a charity event with Extra Life for the Seattle Children’s Hospital. If you ever wanted to see Rarity, Nightmare Moon, or Princess Twilight Sparkle as MtG cards this is the product for you. If you want to buy these cards, you can get them on the 22nd of October at hasbropulse.com. Personally, I don’t actually care about the cards. I’ve never seen My Little Pony and I don’t really have a desire to, but my friend challenged me to make an EDH deck around these ponies and I couldn’t say no. SillyHalfOrc, this one is for you.

Starting off with my commander I got 3 different cards to choose from. All of them can be good for helming their own commander deck, but if I’m making a deck about My Little Pony, it would be disingenuous to not include all 3 of these cards in the deck. So, I had to go with Princess Twilight Sparkle as she is the only 5 color card in the group. This brings me to her main ability that lets everypony win the game. We want everybody to win, but activating that ability isn’t so easy.

So far the only printed ponies in the mane six (did I just say that?) is Rarity and Twilight Sparkle, so to activate that ability we are going to have to get creative. The first card that comes to mind is Spy Kit because that gives the name of all nonlegendary creatures. But, I don’t think that would work for 2 reasons. First, the ponies are obviously legendary creatures, which Spy Kit cannot copy, and second, since the cards haven’t been printed yet I don’t think that Spy Kit can actually pull those names. Without Spy Kit as an option, there is only one other card that I think fits the bill. And that is _____.

Since we are already playing with Un cards, it’s not too much of a stretch to play with another. _____ on its own is not enough to secure us the alternate win condition as it can only mimic one pony at a time. To get around this, we are going to have to copy it. Now, I could dilute the deck and play a bunch of clone effects but we can get there in just one card with Rite of Replication. For the low, low cost of 5WUBRG the following turn, you can name all of the characters and everypony can win the game!

What are we doing when we aren’t assembling the crew? We are being friends of course! With cards like Rites of Flourishing, Mind’s Aglow, Tempt with Discovery and more we get to help everypony on the table draw cards and play lands. No pony will be left behind as we make sure everyone can execute their gameplan. Cards like Horn of Greed and Walking Archive both feel like they can be the plots of certain episodes while also facilitating the gameplan of friendship.

I now want to take some time and discuss the individual cards of Rarity and Nightmare Moon as they offer pretty interesting effects and require some building around. Rarity, obviously, works better in a deck filled with rares and mythics. But her second ability requires a my little pony toy. After looking around for a bit, I came across the Equestria Girls Mall Collection Rainbow Dash which has all 5 colors of Magic present both in its outfit and mane which is perfect and makes Rarity an amazing Mother of Runes variant.

Next up we have Nightmare Moon. A 6/6 flyer for 6 is decent, and 8/8 flying menace for 6 is pretty good, and 12 mana in 2 installments that can be paid for by anypony that draws you 6 cards and still leaves behind a 4/4 flyer all in one card is pretty great! (And you help out Princess Luna as a nice bonus). The restriction of having a moon in the art means that what we draw isn’t going to be the best cards ever, but we still get a nice selection. I went with Imprisoned in the Moon, Future Sight, Descendants’ Path, Gravewaker, Hallowed Moonlight, and Paraselene.

For the rest of this article, I want to talk about specific cards that fit the theme of the deck. Now, if you have seen the show, there’s a good chance I got some of these cards wrong, so if you have better suggestions as for what I can add to the deck I am happy to hear. I also got a lot of help for this article using this deck from tappedout made by rupertajm89. I will italicize anything that was pulled from their deck.

Rainbow Dash: Loyal Pegasus is the perfect choice for this equestrian. She comes out very quickly and is based entirely around friendship. Perfect choice for the deck.

Fluttershy: Plated Pegasus prevents damage which seems in line with what Fluttershy would do.

Applejack: Workhorse which is honestly just perfect.

Pinkie Pie: Thundermare is one of the weaker cards here, thematically, but for how energetic Pinkie Pie is this is close enough.

Spike: Sarkhan’s Whelp’s art is fairly similar to what Spike looks like. Just ignore the Sarkhan part and this works great.

Princess Celestia: Celestial Force’s art if you squint hard enough looks like a horse. Also gaining the life each turn is relevant for other cards in the deck.

Discord: While he may not look like Discord, Tyrant of Discord has the same energy.

Gilda: In a group hug deck, you don’t want people attacking you and Retaliator Griffen serves to keep them away.

Queen Chrysalis: Progenitor Mimic is a great changeling and can even function as a win condition with _____.

Zecora: Zebra Unicorn. She’s not even a unicorn in the show, but the card is neat so why not.

The Library: Walking Archive is literally a walking library. I don’t know if this has been a plot of an episode yet, but I feel like with all the magic Twilight Princess does it could happen.

Sweetie Belle: My wife suggested Temple Bell for this and I thought it was great. I still don’t know who Sweetie Bell is.

The deck, while it seems janky (let’s be real, it is janky) it can still win in a lot of unique and interesting ways if you aren’t going for the everypony is a winner angle. For example, if you throw Noble Quarry on your Spitemare you can probably just kill the opponent. Storm Herd is a one-card win condition, and Loyal Unicorn can let the whole team swing in every turn.

Conclusion

Going into this, I had very little knowledge of the My Little Pony universe, but after working on this I have to say I had a lot of fun building the deck. I love group hug decks and this one hugs people like none other. While I will probably not go out and buy the cards, I hope that for the people who do buy the cards and want to build a deck around them this gives them a good starting point. And if you somehow manage to pull off Rite of Replication on ____ for the victory, I do believe that is an instance of everypony winning the game. Thank you all for reading, I hope you have a great week and an amazing Tuesday!

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