Hey everyone, Cups here with a new deck list created by one of the My Little Pony CCG dev team members, Adam! This one is all about flipping out with crazy Chaos effects, for fun AND profit. Check out below the break for a decklist and a great rundown on the method to Adam's deckbuilding madness!
In this week’s deck article, I’ll be building a Chaos-themed deck that asks a very important question: How many Chaos cards can we actually flip?
The first major piece of the plan is the Element of Surprise, which will allow us to toss any boring non-Chaos cards we may accidentally flip in order to try again, fishing for a Chaos card instead. Running the Element means we’ll need a Discord – so we’ll try out Discord, Give or Take, who also puts us in Purple; Purple is useful for us because it has several good Chaos effects as well as some deck-setting effects that might allow us to "cheat" our Chaos flips.
Discord, Give or Take creates an interesting deckbuilding restriction – flipping him easily will require us to run a lot of cards with the same power (our Purple deck-setting effects will help here, too, however). Looking through the Purple Chaos cards, For Equestria!, Cheerilee Break It Up, and Princess Twilight Sparkle Star Swirl Enthusiast all stand out as good inclusions – but they also all have different power from one another, so hopefully that aspect will come together for us elsewhere. Not strictly a Chaos card, but certainly useful alongside them, is Tempting Offer, which will let us punt opposing Friends out of the faceoff when we flip a Chaos card. This seems like a good way of gaining incremental advantage over time with our Chaos flip plan, so it’ll go in as well.
For our second color, Orange seems like a good way to go – it gives us Coco Crusoe, who doubles-up as both a Chaos card for us to flip and as a card that lets us flip more cards to fish for Chaos cards, and it gives us Dig Deeper, which is another way for us to ‘cheat’ our chaos flips – we flip a Chaos card, put it on the bottom, and then when we go to flip for the next faceoff, we can put it back on top and flip it again. It also nets us the option of using Princess Luna, Sandmare – a powerful card that fits with our Chaos-flip plan.
For our color spotting, we’ll take Sunset Shimmer, Clever Girl and Truffle, Newsworthy – both useful action-gain effects at 2 power for 2 cost. On the Orange side, Coco Crusoe and Dig Deeper both only need 2 Orange, and we’re already running a number of 2-power cards, so adding the fairly straightforward Red Gala, Favorite Cousin and Lyra, Good Posture should cover our color-spotting needs and help us stack the deck towards 2-power cards to make Discord easier to flip. We’ll finish the spotting out with Apples and Oranges, which doesn’t add 2-power cards, but does add 4-power cards – our next-most-common power number.
Filling out the deck, Private Journal gives us a disruption tool that can help us win our faceoffs, and since it’s faceoff-speed, it gives us something else to play with Star Swirl Enthusiast’s effect. Twilight’s Epiphany doesn’t do a whole lot to interact directly with our Chaos plan, but it’s an excellent modal card and it’d be a shame to pass it up.
We could include Zecora, Flashing Back from Absolute Discord as a means of setting the top card of our deck, to both help us flip Discord and ensure we flip our Chaos cards, but instead I’ll go all the way back to Premiere for Zecora, Everfree Guru – we don’t get the 3-power body from Flashing Back, but instead we get a deck-setting effect that gives us card advantage rather than card disadvantage, which is a trade-off I think I’m willing to make in this deck. You may find that Flashing Back’s more aggressive body size works better for you, though!
For our Problem deck, we’ll mostly be looking for Problems our deck can confront efficiently – which means a lot of 2/2 Problems, since we have a lot of 2-power Friends and we’d rather be able to confront with two of them than needing 3. Ponyville in a Bottle also nets us some protection from wide aggro decks, which our removal-light forced-movement-heavy strategy might struggle with, while Avalanche! gives us good value since it’s two-colored and Ancient Research can help us set Chaos cards on top of our deck.
All told, the list looks like this:
Mane Character:
Discord, Give or Take (Absolute Discord)
Friends:
3x Sunset Shimmer, Clever Girl (AD)
2x Zecora, Everfree Guru (Premiere)
3x Princess Twilight Sparkle, Star Swirl Enthusiast (AD)
3x Cheerilee, Break It Up! (AD)
3x Princess Luna, The Sandmare (AD)
3x Coco Crusoe, Flipping Out (AD)
3x Lyra, Good Posture (AD)
3x Truffle, Newsworthy (AD)
3x Red Gala, Favorite Cousin (PRE)
Events:
3x For Equestria! (AD)
3x Twilight's Epiphany (AD)
3x Dig Deeper (AD)
3x Apples and Oranges (PRE)
Resources:
2x Private Journal (AD)
3x Tempting Offer (AD)
2x The Element of Surprise, Element of Disharmony (AD)
Problem Deck:
2x Threat Against Canterlot (Canterlot Nights)
2x Avalanche! (PRE)
2x Ponyville in a Bottle (PRE)
2x Ancient Research (CN)
2x Un-Unicorned (AD)
Thanks for checking out this Chaos deck rundown, and if you like it feel free to try it out – or build your own! And if you have any recommendations for editing this deck, please share them with everyone below!
