(Thurid, Mare of Destiny | Art by Kenta Ishikawa)

Ride, Thurid, Ride

Welcome to Too-Specific Top 10, where if there isn’t a category to rank our pet card at the top of, we’ll just make one up! (Did you know that Trenching Steed is the only equine that lets you sacrifice lands?)

I have been maybe the game's foremost Pegasus fan for decades now. It all started back in 1998, with the printing of Pegasus Stampede.

It's not a good card. You should not play it. Nonetheless, I did back then, religiously. Against all good advice, I continue to do so today, to the point that I made a mono-white lands deck merely to have an excuse to continue playing the pet card from my childhood.

As you might expect, it's my lowest-powered deck, but I find excuses to play it anyhow. Part of that is my penchant for wanting to be the lowest-powered deck at the table, but mostly, it's just me wanting to see the confused look on folks' faces as I sacrifice my own lands for 1/1 fliers. The fact that they'll later bring down a 7/7 lifelinking Angel that makes them all indestructible is beside the point.

When you've been playing Pegasi as long as I have, though, it's hard to look a gift horse in the mouth. So I should probably at least look at changing things up a bit now that we have a dedicated Pegasus commander, right?

Top 10 Equines to Copy With Thurid

Even a casual study of the decklist above will tell you that this is not a one-for-one switch between Sephara, Sky's Blade and Thurid. Indeed, Thurid doesn't actually care that much about what the entire deck is trying to do in making Pegasus tokens.

With Thurid's ability being a cast trigger, the idea of plopping down 10 mana and putting it all into Sacred Mesa doesn't look as good anymore when there could be five things with hooves stacked up in your hand, just waiting to be copied. Which is not to say the five 2/2 fliers wouldn't be relevant, and still a good idea. Just, we've got to at least look at what the options to copy are, right?

Also, what about those pseudo-"Equines"?

Well, first off, we're going to want to use them. Mirror Entity is already in the original decklist, and continues to be a great win-con in a deck full of fliers. But with a commander that cares about three different creature types, it would be a bit of insanity not to include some creatures that are all three. Mirror Entity is yet another example of a card that's actually not doing that much with Thurid's ability, however. Sure, you can copy it, but then you just have another 1/1, with an X ability that doesn't stack.

What does look really good with Thurid, however? The Changelings with effects. Irregular Cohort, for instance, is going to give you no less than four "Horses" when you cast it with Thurid in play. My actual favorite, though? Crib Swap is a "Unicorn" of a card, being both an instant and a Unicorn, which means that it will be copied by Thurid. Exiling two creatures sounds pretty good to me!

That's more or less the end of the list, however. We might end up playing Universal Automaton simply for it's one-mana cost, but otherwise, the Changeling representatives are pretty underwhelming. So, with that box checked, that just leaves the real things. Should we take a look?

Criteria: Horses, Pegasi, or Unicorns that fall within the white color identity and have an ability that is cumulative when said creature is copied. As is tradition, all results are ordered by EDHREC score.

10. Ronom Unicorn

(2,436 Inclusions, 0% of 2,172,640 Decks)

I expected this list to be mostly enters effects, but it turns out that if you get multiple copies of a creature with a sacrifice effect, that doubles things up for you as well. And while I'm still not blown away by how narrow Ronom Unicorn is, two mana for four power and toughness and the option to remove two problem enchantments is well worth the price of admission.

As for the Unicorn in the room, I do feel like I have to cover whether or not I'm happy with Unicorns and Horses suddenly being a part of my Pegasi world, with the answer being that I have mixed feelings about it. My initial reflex is to just go pure Pegasi anyhow, but if you've really looked through that list, you know that a Pegasi deck is never going to be pure Pegasi anyhow.

While not overwhelming, a significant amount of the Pegasi herd give flying to creatures, making them sort of a non-bo with their Pegasi brethren which already fly. While it doesn't make any flavor sense for those "riders" to be Horses and Unicorns, mechanically it works just fine. Throw it in with Thurid's extra pair of legs in the category of "things that don't make sense", and let's do what we can with our reality, shall we?

9. Brightmare

(2,739 Inclusions, 0% of 2,172,640 Decks)

Full honesty, and I imagine I'm not alone in this: I have always loved Nightmare. If I could have picked something to eliminate when making a shoutout to it in Brightmare, however, it would've been making it another not-so-great card. Three mana to tap a creature and gain a little bit of life gets things done in limited, but anywhere else, this is just not worth the price of admission, even when you double it up.

8. Diamond Mare

(5,761 Inclusions, 0% of 4,725,325 Decks)

Diamond Mare is a bit better, if you find an interest in lifegain along the way. So let's explore that through the lens of Thurid and equine, shall we?

I wish I could tell you there was more of a list than that, but there just isn't. Even worse, there are plenty of lifelink equine to turn on Crested Sunmare and the like, so there's really no reason to care about Diamond Mare, at least not in the current deck we're building.

7. Pegasus Guardian

(7,070 Inclusions, 0% of 2,172,640 Decks)

Pegasus Guardian might be in a similar arena, only with Blink strategies. With Rescue the Foal not really doing anything with our commander, we'd have to have a significant amount of other creatures with enters or leaves abilities to make Guardian good enough, as six mana for a creature that might make a 1/1 every turn is just not good enough on its own. So, let's take a look at that in the same way we did for lifegain and Diamond Mare, shall we?

With similar results, it would appear. With that said, my original deck does play Pegasus Guardian, and takes a ton of advantage of Rescue the Foal. Why? Well, because it's a lands matter deck that goes out of its way to sacrifice lands, and therefore plays every version of Knight of the White Orchid. In other words, I think that the average Thurid deck might not go out of its way for this one. I, on the other hand, will not be giving up on the Pegasus Stampede dream, and will therefore be blinking Loyal Warhounds until the cows come home.

6. Boreas Charger

(7,801 Inclusions, 0% of 2,172,640 Decks)

Of course, there is also a Pegasus version of Knight of the White Orchid in Boreas Charger. It's not nearly as good, but given that it's our theme, we're obviously going to include it and be stoked to make multiple copies of it. It is worth noting, however, that Boreas Charger's ability is a leave-the-battlefield effect, not an enter-the-battlefield effect. This can be a bit unwieldy, as flying creatures don't actually die on their own that often. Which is just one more reason to go deep into the Pegasus Stampede/Karoo plan so we can guarantee that we'll have less lands when we finally do get our various copies of Charger to leave, right? Right?

5. Bill the Pony

(Helms 539 Decks, Rank #1,384; 8,320 Inclusions, 0% of 1,723,344 Decks)

I thought about eliminating Bill the Pony from this list with additional criteria, but didn't for two reasons: One, there's really not anything worth talking about further down this sparse list of hoofstock. Two, I think that a lot of people will fall for the trap of legendary equine and Thurid, both right now as building is apace, and in the future as more legendary Horse-like creatures are printed. To spell it out, then, Thurid is not good with legendary creatures for the most part, as either the copy you make or the original immediately dies to the legendary rule. You do still get enters or dies effects, meaning that Bill the Pony will give you four Food tokens instead of two. Is that really worth four mana, though, especially when we've already established that we don't really care about lifegain?

4. Vryn Wingmare

(15,863 Inclusions, 1% of 2,172,640 Decks)

Welcome to the awkward part of playing a Pegasus deck: Vryn Wingmare. Don't get me wrong, it's a good card! It's just that things require a bit of explanation when you say you're whipping out your weakest deck, and then put a Stax piece onto the battlefield. In singles, it's not too debilitating, and it actually does work fairly well with our new strategy of "we're playing a lot of Horses that will get doubled by our commander". I do think that when you double up this specific Pegasus, however, that you're going to have a table start to come after you. And I think you're going to deserve it.

Which sounds like fun, doesn't it? Oh, did I not mention that I really enjoy Stax, and have for years? Take a look at the bio down at the bottom, folks, it's all right there.

3. Akroan Horse

(17,591 Inclusions, 0% of 4,725,325 Decks)

To be honest, I really love the idea of Akroan Horse in multiples. Two 1/1 Soldiers a turn is a lot, and with that many bodies coming in and the fact that the rest of your deck flies, you're not really worried about them as blockers. My only wish is that they were Human Soldiers so that we could abuse Cavalry Pegasus, but that is probably just greedy. In general, however, yes to Akroan Horse in Thurid decks.

As for my deck personally, here's where it becomes decision time. Any of my decks that aren't trying to go Max Power generally have one or several deck building restrictions. The original for my Pegasus deck was that it played every card the was, made, or had a Pegasus in the art, but that got more and more unwieldy as Precons got better and more Pegasi were printed in other colors. So instead, I switched the decks restriction over to not being able to play any other sort of creature token besides Pegasi. This would kick Akroan Horse out of the running, if I stuck with the same restriction. The question is whether I should stick with that, go back to the original restriction, or make a new one under Thurid. We'll have to see!

2. Crested Sunmare

(22,016 Inclusions, 1% of 2,172,640 Decks)

With our commander having lifelink, it's going to be trivial to turn on Crested Sunmare, making it easily one of the best cards you can copy with Thurid. 5/5 indestructible Horses add up quickly, and the fact that you'd get two of them the turn that you played down Sunmare makes this a particularly crushing play. Five mana is a lot, but it's also right on curve to play the turn after you play your commander. Everything about this just lines up like they thought of is specifically when designing Thurid. Probably because they did.

1. Starnheim Courser

(36,287 Inclusions, 2% of 2,172,640 Decks)

Here lies the inherent question of Thurid, however: Pegasi do care about other things. They care about enchantments, lands, Humans, and non-fliers, just to name a few. Obviously, however, that's too many things to care about to have a cohesive deck. So what part do you focus on? If there was one thing I would have liked Thurid to answer, it would have been this. The card says "focus on the equine cards", but there just really aren't that many of them. Of the ones there are, there are even fewer that are good cards, and none of them seem to be on the same page! Starnheim Courser is a great example of this. After going through our top ten with a full focus on creatures to copy, we find that our most copyable creature wants to pivot us back to Sacred Mesa and the like. That's not terrible, as you're going to be paying two mana for 2/2 fliers indefinitely. Building this deck, though, we need to figure out what we're actually going to do when we grow up.

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Honorable Mentions

There was one avenue we skipped over in the full field of things equine want to do, however: Things that become Horses.

While Metallic Mimic and Bloodline Pretender are good finds that we'll end up playing, the real diamond in the rough here is Roaming Throne. Doubling Thurid's copy trigger is huge, as is the same for Keleth, Sunmane Familiar, Boreas Charger, and all of the various "give flying to something" Pegasi. While it's a bit heavy on the pocketbook, it's worth investing in if you can. Just keep in mind that while the non-Changelings do count as Pegasi when they hit the battlefield, they aren't on the stack, so you don't get doubles of them.

As for the rest, let's see if there's anything we missed with this week's criteria tightening things down.

Regal Bunnicorn is yet another Horse that's trying to get us to lean back into tokens. While it doesn't do anything in multiples, according to our criteria, two Bunnicorns down on a huge field will mean two huge bodies which make each other bigger. Plus you get to make Monty Python jokes, which is always a plus. My actual favorite in the arena of "just make more bodies and make them bigger to swing in with", however, is Loyal Pegasus. A single mana for two 2/1 fliers that will let each other attack is just good value, especially since if your commander sticks around they're actually 3/2's. Six damage a turn in the air adds up pretty quick, and it's doubtful they'll be the only bodies up there. Nyxborn Unicorn won't be one of them unless it decides to ride a passing Pegasus, either with a Pegasus Courser effect or with its Bestow cost. Whichever one you decide on, however, it will start handing out +1/+1 counters to passing Horses, which isn't a bad deal when it comes to winning through combat, either.

Which I think is the actual focus of Thurid: Combat. It's easy to forget with the copy trigger that this is a Lord that makes all your equine bodies bigger. Curving out a Loyal Pegasus, Regal Bunnicorn, and Boreas Charger into your commander would have you swinging for 10 damage on turn four, to then untap and do who knows what once you actually get your copy triggers going. That's the greedy way to do things, with most of those cards feeling much better if you instead play a rock down on turn two, play your commander on turn three, and then start playing down Horses. But that's the beauty of Thurid. You have the option to play down greedy and empty our your hand, or to play patiently and have copies to spare with cards still in hand so you don't get blown out by the board wipe. Either way, though, I think the focus is combat.

So, shall we see what that looks like?

Could we focus the deck more? Yes, absolutely. But this isn't trying to be a hyper-competitive deck, it's just trying to pal around with the precons of the world and play some Pegasi. All in all, I'm happy with it. It comes out of the gates a little slow, what with the situational ramp and all the taplands, but once you get your commander down things feel pretty solid, even if all you're doing is playing out 2/1 Pegasi. Just don't go too nuts on the horseys in your hand if you've got a token creator out, keep those for the inevitable board wipe!

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Nuts and Bolts

There always seems to be a bit of interest in how these lists are made (this seems like a good time to stress once again that they are based on EDHREC score, NOT my personal opinion…), and people are often surprised that I’m not using any special data or .json from EDHREC, but rather just muddling my way through with some Scryfall knowledge! For your enjoyment/research, here is this week’s Scryfall search.

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What Do You Think?

Pegasi have always been my weakest deck, and that was intentional. Part of the reason I'm pursuing things with the new commander, however, is that there's really not much call for a low-power deck anymore. Precons have gotten better, and that's where most folks start. With that being the case, and even with my penchant for trying to be the lowest-powered deck at the table, I find that I'm not playing the deck as much anymore, unless the folks I'm playing with are really new. Let us know in the comments, and we'll see you at the winged table up in the sky.

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