Felt nostalgic and wanted to remind myself that I draw for fun, so drew a favorite character of mine growing up.

Adventures in Deckbuilding Part 146: Twilight Sparkle, Friendship is Magic (Purple/Yellow/Orange Aggro) [Harmony]

Twilight Sparkle, Friendship is Magic

Call Me Obsessed, I Guess

Someone (I believe it might have been Grand Pause) told me shortly after the release of Friends Forever that Fluttershy, Acceptable Business Attire was without doubt one of the strongest cards in the new set. Now, I’ve monkeyed around with her before, like in the Ironclad list from several months ago, and now I think that counting this week I’ve elaborated almost all of the ways to get “can’t be frightened” spread out onto your Pegasus characters. The old deck used Ember and counters, the Harmony version uses Orange Thunderlane, and now this week we have Endless Friendship. Each method has its own little piece of impracticality, usually from grasping at several colours, but luckily this week we have a Mane that specializes in running a 3+ colour deck.

Simply put, Twilight was the original tri-colour supporter. Since she flips after you establish two separate colours, it thus only follows that you should use her new colour to establish entry into a third colour. And since all of the tri-corns are situated at the relatively low level of two for their reqs, it stood to reason that this Mane could deploy one of them very early on, especially if a Flash Sentry could hit the field first. It’s worth remembering, by the way, that Flash is a Pegasus and indeed he’s the toughest thing that this deck can stick via the Fluttershy-Twilight immunity. But since we have a couple of other important alicorns to play anyway, I thought his inclusion well worth the effort.

Plus, it’s worth remembering that if we have a Twilight on the field, we’re adding two to the Power of every other Friend that’s out. This alone means that a board of just Twilight and a few Pegasi should be devastatingly effective at confronting Problems, while at the same time being immune to removal so long as we keep the AT around to protect Twilight. Indeed, Twilight’s main strength in comparison to Thunderlane and Ember is that despite not being a Pegasus herself, she has defense built in to stay in play. Ember, meanwhile, will eat opposing removal as soon as she enters play (especially since the opponent has no other targets that do anything), and even the fact that Thunderlane locks himself in doesn’t quite salvage the fact that he just isn’t a good card. So a deck that can easily and somewhat reliably get Twilight up and then keep her protected might be the right way to pursue this strategy.

Now, one important thing to remember with this Mane is that, coming as she did in Celestial Solstice, Twilight predated the existence of multicoloured Friends by a couple of sets. One could rightly ask how exactly her Start-text interacts with such things, and unfortunately the answer is not the one that we’re hoping for. In order to flip her, the Friend that’s just entered play needs to have a completely distinct colour-set from your other Friends in play — it can’t share a colour with anything that you already have. Fundamentally, this means that playing multicolour Friends early is a huge liability. (Note, though, that Twilight only cares about the colours among your Friends, so starting with Trading Traditions is still just fine.) Factoryjack, though, is still in here even though the opening colour scheme is likely to be Purple and Orange. Honestly, I thought that she was simply too good of a card to pass up, and given how many other entry options we have, it shouldn’t be too hard to assemble an opening hand that can unlock all three of our colours early.

And it will be important to get those colours available early, because we expect that Trading Traditions to go away quick. We’re not stopping to smell the roses after all, and with no point acceleration or high bonus Problems, keeping the tempo should be pretty important here. As I said above, the endgame state that we’re shooting for is essentially Twilight, some Pegasi, and hopefully a Day Shift or two. The good news is that Yellow remains the quintessential colour for messing with control, with the best anti-Troublemaker and anti-Resource tools in the game right now. So I’d say the outlook is pretty good on that front.

It’s safe to say that I’ve become more than a little obsessed with finding optimal ways to take advantage of Fluttershy lately. In truth, it isn’t even all about combining her with protection from frightening; her global Persistent alone is the strongest half of that interaction. Recently, I’ve even began considering if I can fashion some kind of Blue/Yellow Pegasus Control deck centred around her and Rainbow Dash, On Even Ground. That is currently in testing, but it does look at least a little promising. Maybe I’ll find a place to showcase it at some point. Anyway, see you all next week!

The good news is by now I should hope most people have seen the kind of shenanigans that can be pulled off in a well-honed Paradox Pony list (and if not I expect you’ll see some of it on the upcoming BABSCon Harmony stream). That’s the good news because, in spite of my apologies, she still isn’t showing up here. Next week will give us Fluttershy, Friend to Animals instead.