Mark Rosewater has claimed that Alliances was one of the most innovative sets ever in terms of card design. Let’s see how well suited that innovation is to winning the game quickly.

Challenge

Using only cards from Alliances, win the game as quickly as possible.

Assumptions

You have perfect luck. For example, even after you shuffle your library, it’s ordered how you want. You may not assume anything about your opponent’s hand or library except that he won’t do anything relevant.

Winning “quickly” refers to both the turn of the game and whether you’re playing or drawing first. Turn three on the draw is quicker than turn four on the play but not as quick as turn three on the play.

You may only use four copies of any individual card.

Send your solutions to nex342+puzzle at gmail dot com with the subject line “Puzzle – Allied Strategies”, and I’ll include the best ones in next week’s article along with the next puzzle!

Good luck!

Solution to Last Week’s Puzzle

It turns out Omniscience is pretty powerful when you have infinite luck. Here’s Nick Tower’s solution for an arbitrary amount of life via Touch of the Eternal on the upkeep of turn five:

Play	Mana	Cards in Hand
Turn one		7
Forest		6
Arbor Elf		5
Turn two		6
Forest		5
Arbor Elf		4
Farseek for Island		3
Turn three		4
Forest		3
Gilded Lotus		2
Turn four		3
Forest		2
Omniscience		1
Divination x3		4
Griffin Protector		3
Archaeomancer		2
Unsummon targeting Archaeomancer		1

Repeatedly cast and bounce Archaeomancer to make Griffin Protector’s power as large as you want, then cast Fungal Sprouting for that many permanents.

Ryan Nightingale came up with this solution for arbitrary amounts of life by the upkeep of turn six

without using Omniscience:

Play	Mana	Cards in Hand
Turn one		7
Forest		6
Arbor Elf		5
Turn two		6
Mountain		5
Fervor		4
Turn three		5
Forest		4
Elvish Archdruid × 4		0
Turn four		1
Elvish Visionary × 2		1
Tap Archdruids for 7 each	× 28	1
Garruk, Primal Hunter, drawing five cards	× 23	5
Island	× 23 +	4
Farseek finding Island	× 21 +	3
Boundless Realms × 3, finding a total of thirty-five lands of various types		0
Turn five	70	1
Garruk, Primal Hunter, drawing five cards	65	5
Titanic Growth × 4 targeting an Elvish Archdruid	57	1
Garruk, Primal Hunter, drawing twenty-one cards	52	21
Bloodthrone Vampire	50	20
Gilded Lotus	48	19
Clock of Omens	44	18
Chronomaton × 4	40	14
Archaeomancer	36	13
Talrand, Sky Summoner	32	12

You can now create an infinite loop as follows:

• Tap Gilded Lotus for .
• Untap Gilded Lotus with two Chronomatons.
• Tap Gilded Lotus for .
• Untap Gilded Lotus with two Chronomatons.
• Sacrifice all four Chronomatons and Archaeomancer to Bloodthrone Vampire.
• Cast Faith's Reward, returning it to your hand with Archaeomancer.

With Talrand, this produces an arbitrarily large number of Drake tokens.