“Mono-white Happily Ever After?” you say. “Are you crazy?!?” Yeah — crazy like a fox!
The idea here is to use Sphinx of the Guildpact to satisfy Happily’s five-color requirement — the hardest of the three — despite being a generic-mana artifact.
Arcanist's Owl will help you dig for either of the pieces you need for your win. Once you have them on the board, you only need any two of instant, sorcery, and planeswalker, plus 21 or more life.
At this point, the rest of the deck is pretty much a mono-white fliers to build on what we already have. This way, we have a solid defense while we are assembling our win con. This also means that, if our opponent fizzles our primary strategy somehow, we still have a fighting chance.
There’s a single copy of Ajani, Inspiring Leader in there to both check the planeswalker box and provide lifegain to meet that requirement. He also can deal some target removal if need be, and his ultimate can help if you wind up needing to go for the more traditional win. A handful of Goldmane Griffins allow you to tutor him while also fitting the flier theme.
Aerial Assault provides creature removal, and lifegain, and provides a sorcery in your graveyard. Rally of Wings, meanwhile, boosts your fliers for combat and provides an instant. I highly recommend using one if you cast Sephara, Sky's Blade for her alternate cost to effectively get her plus +2/+2 across the board for three mana.
You can only use the Response side of Response / Resurgence in the deck’s current setup, but it still provides some highly efficient removal and counts as both an instant and a sorcery in your graveyard. I would love to be able to use Resurgence, but it’s just not worth it to me to splash a second color.
Emergence Zone is a good way to get your pieces on the board at the last second before your upkeep to help avoid removal. Its presence on the board may also scare your opponent enough to induce him to leave mana up for counters, and waste a lot of traditional opportunities and hurt himself overall as a result. Just remember that you need one mana to power it so, if Sphinx of the Guildpact is your last piece and you want to flash it, you will actually need a total of nine lands.
My original idea for this deck used creatures and planeswalkers with hybrid mana, like Arcanist's Owl. While there were a lot of 2- and 3-drops, so you may be able to assemble your five-color team earlier, the problem was that none of the green or red options synergized well with the rest of the deck, so if your combo fizzled, or until you got it in place, you just had a bunch of random creatures on the battlefield. Sphinx of the Guildpact is a little slower, but should be more consistent. If anyone wants to play with the hybrid option, let me know how it works out.
The cool thing about this is that, because it’s mono, you don’t need any of those expensive color fixing options. At the time I’m writing this, the entire deck is available in near mint on TCGPlayer for less than US$10. So pick it up and try for a surprise win against your friends at FNM!
