Into The Vault: Phelddagrif, the Hippo of Happiness

Written by Jeff Tan

        In the midst of war, destruction, death, and chaos, the Phelddagrif stands adamant in its struggle for a peaceful plane. Planeswalkers arrive and threaten its utopian world of happiness. What better way to curb destruction than to provide LIFE and PROSPERITY! Yes… Shove LIFE and PROSPERITY down those planeswalker’s throats until they choke on it. Today we will explore the unorthodox playstyle of EDH known as Group Hug with one of the best group hug commanders, the Phelddagrif.

The Commander

        The fabulously purple Phelddagrif is a 4/4 Phelddagrif type creature with 3 very potent support abilities. If this was an RPG game, the Phelddagrif, quite commonly called the Hippo, would be your team support. It doesn’t have any static abilities despite the wings in the image, but its active abilities are where it draws its strength. Take caution though, playing this commander means you must be ready to utilize all the possible political tools you may have at your disposal into making yourself NOT the target. You have to spread love and happiness to all the players laced with impending doom. Feed them like the witch from Hansel and Gretel until they’re ripe for the slaughter. We will get into the different Hug cards in a bit, but first we will see how the mere presence of the Hippo is already powerful enough.

        The first ability is a white ability. For 1 white mana the Hippo gains Flying while another player would be able to gain 2 life. It might not sound like much, but in a commander game where many commanders rely on combat and direct damage to win games, sometimes giving people a shot of life may actually gain you favors; and this is what you want, to gain favor. Aside from combat, this ability is particularly powerful in mitigating damage from field effects such as:

   

Spells that trigger damage on actions

        Its second ability is a blue ability. For 1 blue, the Hippo basically evades board wipes and most removals while letting an opponent draw a card. This particular ability is actually more potent than most people give it credit for. This ability literally means, as long as you have 1 mana, you will get to bounce the Hippo and re-cast it without commander tax. Then, you use your political will and reward an opponent of your choice with a shiny new card. Now let me explain the broken part. You can use this ability SEVERAL TIMES before he is actually bounced. Since the ability’s bounce mechanic is not part of it’s cost, you can activate this ability as many times as you want for as long as you have blue mana and you hold priority. The Hippo would only bounce when any of the activations are allowed to resolve. By doing so, you can then strike a deal with an oppone- i mean… ally, and give that person all the cards you could afford; in exchange for perks such as protection or other “gifts”.

        Its last ability is a green ability. For 1 Green mana, the Hippo gains trample while providing an opponent with a powerful 1/1 green, Hippopotamus token. The trample factor is not particularly useful most of the time, but it’s a nice thing to have in specific situations. However, what this ability can provide is some very annoying situations for your opponents; and could easily flip someone’s favor towards you. Take for example, a player is at the brink of death with an opponent sending his minions to seal his grave. In that situation, you can easily keep him alive by providing him blockers to completely negate non-trample damage. Of course, your services should never be for free… *wink wink*.

        But NOW, the aggressive player’s gaze is on you, you may think. Well, given you played your role well, you should have stuff in play that everyone wants OR you have answers in your hand that will ruin that player’s day be it removal or fog effects or straight up board wipes. The bottom line is, group hug decks excel at making people feel like they are winning/thriving while you are building a hand that is capable of disrupting the board towards your favor in the end. It’s a test of good game state judgement, politics, and surgical plays. It is unconventional, morally ambiguous, and straight up sneaky. AND I LOVE IT.

Hugs and More Hugs!

        Group hugging is an art. Its making sure that everyone is enjoying the gifts you give to them while not letting them get too ahead of themselves. Give them cards, mana, creatures, protection, etc, just make sure they don’t go beyond what you can handle. At some point, your gifts may give one player a HUGE advantage. You have to carefully assess whether your companions are capable of handling that game ending threat or not. If they can, don’t interfere and let them use up their powerful cards. However, when it threatens YOU, that is when you have to pull strings. What the Hippo giveth, the Hippo takes away with furious aggression.

        Let us go through some common and obvious HUG cards.

       

Common Group Hug Cards

        As you can see above, there are some Hug cards that are controllable (Spurnmage Advocate, Pir’s Whim), and there are those that cannot be controlled (Howling mine, Dictate of Karametra, etc). Depending on how your Hippo deck is adjusted, you have to properly select the type of Hug cards you use.

DO NOT USE HUG CARDS IF YOU CANNOT CONTROL THE LONG TERM EFFECTS.

        What im trying to say is that, as much as you are trying to be the giver of advantage, brazenly giving an opponent access to huge spells or creatures without a back up plan is a terrible idea.

        Take this card for example:

   

        Imagine casting a Tempting Wurm and having these drop from your opponent’s hands. If SOMEHOW, you have an answer to all of these then GREAT, otherwise, steer clear from Hug cards that you cannot hold back.

        Moving on, there are also Hug cards that are Aggressive in nature. Aggressive in a sense that it directly messes up a player while benefiting another.

        Cards like:

   

        Then there are Answer Hug Cards. These hug cards eliminates heavy threats from the board/stack while TRYING not to make that person hate you.

        Cards like:

   

        There are tons more Hug cards that you can use and its usually very clear which ones are easily handled and which ones are a bit too much for your deck. The most important part is that you dont put too many Hug cards, which leads me to the next chapter.

Control the Favors, Control the Game

        Being a Hug deck, the Hippo excels at providing EXACTLY what players need at certain scenarios. This means that players never usually target the Hug deck first as they benefit from your mere existence. This already gives you one advantage which is the opponent’s are too busy getting things from you that they neglect to see the setup that would be formed. For control decks, this would be a familiar scenario where your opponents would be exhausting their resources trying to kill each other while you do your part for the community. Do NOT be first to respond. Let them play it out.

        So then the question is, how do you control the game without becoming the threat? Well, you would need to play with your opponent’s emotions. It is evil. It is manipulative. But such is the will of the Hippo.

        First off, use answers that provide benefits to either the player you are hindering or to the other players. These usually fall under the category of Answer Hugs, which typically sound like, “Get rid of this thing, but your opponent also gets this other thing”. This impacts the board in such a way that you are being disruptive against people who are trying to end the game, but at the same time being political in either maintaining their favor OR transferring favor to other players.

        Then, you would also need a form of crowd control. Luckily, having the commander with WHITE and BLUE allows you to use a long list of wipes that have very unique properties. However, use them sparingly, since your opponents might get a bit miffed if you repeatedly blast the board cause you panicked. Its all about the table manipulation. Let them handle impending death first.

       

        Whenever you perform an action, either to eliminate a threat or to clear the board, you have to try and extract FAVOR from your opponent/s. This is how Hug decks avoid being the target because technically you are never usually the early threat. But, misusing your control options would possibly get you griefed by another player who has had enough of your free donuts. Which leads me to…

Building the Fort of Happiness

        Depending on the players in the game, building a fort for yourself may be important. What does this mean? This means you have to use cards that make people NOT want to attack you. No politics, the cards just straight up make it tedious to attack you. This causes your threat level to go down considering that attacking you would cause them either to lose their stuff or to waste their resources.

        Typically called Pillow Fort cards, these cards hinder aggression.

       

        Most of these cards prevent combat, but there are cards out there that can provide spikes to your pillowfort. These cards are usually just for precaution. There will always be that one guy who attacks the Hug deck for god knows what reason... *ehem* moving on. Aside from being a precautionary measure, this is also legitimate end game strategy considering you are accelerating the board with your free cards and mana. At some point, creatures ARE going to get larger and more threatening. These cards help make you NOT the target of those.

Bow to the will of the Happy Hippo

        “With all of these talk about group hugs and support and threat management, you still haven’t told us how this deck wins… if at all??”, you ask. Well let me get to that.

        The Hippo deck is designed to be one of the best support decks around. Typically, this means that whoever the Hippo favors would probably win more often than not. That said, this doesn’t mean we just bend over and die once the 2 other players are gone. The Hippo has several ways of closing out games while your opponent’s least expect it.

        Let me go through just some of the most common ways.

        RITE OF REPLICATION ROUTE

        Psychotic Replication - Psychosis Crawler + Rite of Replication + Draw Effects - This method maximizes the many draw effects the Hippo deck has, most of which are forced draws. Psychosis Crawler gets bigger the more cards you have in hand as well as hurting each other player every time you would draw a card. Now imagine having 2 or 6 of these through Rite of Replication. That would mean that each card you draw would hurt all other players for 6 life loss.

     

        Suture Replication - Suture Priest + Phelddagrif + Rite of Replication - Suture priest is an extremely potent card in the Phelddagrif deck for 1 reason: The Hippo’s 3rd ability grants one player 1/1 Hippo tokens. This means that given enough mana the Hippo would just keep throwing tiny hippos at a player and that player loses 1 life for each hippo. Now multiply it by 6 similar with the Psychosis Crawler method means for some very scary interactions.

   

        HYPER Suture Priest - Suture Priest + Phelddagrif + Mana Dork + Intruder Alarm - This is a very hard combo to pull off. This combo consists of 2 very fragile cards, the Hippo, and an enchantment.

        The jist of it is:

         Mana Dork is in play and not summoning sick -> Suture Priest in play -> Phelddarif in play -> Intruder Alarm in play -> Tap mana dork to produce GREEN -> activate Hippo ability to produce a token for any opponent -> Token Triggers Intruder Alarm and untaps all the creatures including the mana dork -> REPEAT X Times.

        This is one of the infinite combos that can only be done by Phelddagrif with little effort. This guarantees a win for the player. The downside to this combo is that it is VERY is to disrupt. In between trying to untap all your creatures with Intruder Alarm, your opponents can easily shoot down the dork or the Suture Priest or the Hippo since the combo needs to be uninterrupted to actually win the game.

   

        Smothering Mill - Smothering Tithe + Multiple Draw Effects - This is an interesting NEW method of winning. Whenever your opponents draw a card, Smothering tithe provides you 1 treasure that you can convert into mana by sacrificing. This means that per cycle you COULD get a potential of 3 treasures provided no one is tripping you up by paying 2 mana tax. With other draw effects like howling mine you could get even more per cycle. Now what if we weaponize those draw effects. By using a mass draw card effect like prosperity, you would receive 3x the amount you paid for X in the form of treasures. Casting prosperity for 5 would mean you would get 15 treasures which is a net positive on your mana accounting. If you could somehow chain these draw spells, this could easily mill out the whole table. Be careful though. Do NOT mill yourself out first. Also, be careful what your opponent’s might draw in to. Giving them vast numbers of cards may very well give them answers to your next spell. Keep counter back up just in case.

   

        Approach of the Hippo - Approach the Second Sun + Draw effects - This is just an alternative to the Smothering Mill strat. You could win by straight up casting Approach twice in a game. But, with the help of Smothering Tithe and Draw effects, you could accelerate the process. Be careful about casting Approach prematurely. Casting this kind of card makes you the target IMMEDIATELY.

Conclusion

        Until the very end, the Hippo just keeps giving… whether the other players like it or not. This kind of strategy is definitely not for everyone and it often becomes difficult to balance the Hugs from the stabs to the face. But, with a little practice and a ton for Threat management, I can definitely say that the Phelddagrif deck is one of my personal favorites to pilot. This article has gone long enough already so ill probably have other comments in a future post if there are things i missed. If you have any questions of desires to build such a strategy, do shoot us a chat.

        Til Next Article!