Prayers are invocations to other beings for their consideration or intervention in some manner. They are commonly directed at beings perceived to be gods from the perspective of the one doing the praying. Little ponies of a religious bent commonly pray to [[Celestia]] or [[Luna]], or less frequently to other beings such as Dread Pantheon members. Shadhavar often pray to a member of the [[Dread Pantheon]] to which they have devoted themselves, although this has declined drastically since 3359 AE.

Prayers may take many forms, ranging from very simple extemporaneous speaking to extremely complex and ritualized ceremonies. Some prayers can be technically classified as ritual magic, since the words and actions they involve can in themselves create magical patterns with particular effects. Some scholars argue that these effects are essential to truly effective prayer, the general belief being that a prayer must necessarily invoke some sort of magical effect in order to allow the words of an individual to reach a physically distant god.

Whatever the case, most prayer, effective or not, is performed in a cargo-cult fashion of rotely repeating a traditional set of phrases and actions in the hopes that it will produce a desired effect. Some of these traditional prayers do produce some (usually insignificant and nonspecific) magic which can be measured, but many do nothing.