Locations
“This game’s going long, yes.”
“I’ll tap four lands to cast a Filigree Crawler. Salivating Gremlins triggers — it’s now a 4/3 trampler.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And I’ll tap my last nine lands to cast Metalwork Colossus. It’s discounted by two because of my Cogworker's Puzzleknot.”
“Okay,” you say. “Wait . . . did you say ‘Metalwork Colossus’?”
“Yes, Metalwork Colossus,” Avery says. “Salivating Gremlins triggers again, so it’s now a 6/3 trampler.”
“Why are you playing a Metalwork Colossus?” you ask.
“I had some artifacts in my Sealed pool. I’ll declare my attack, so do you have any responses?”
“You’re playing a Metalwork Colossus,” you say.
Avery gives you an even look. “Yes,” he says slowly, “I’m. Playing. Metalwork. Colossus. Now, do you have anything to cast in response to my declaration?”
You glance at his Renegade Wheelsmith, and suddenly remember the removal you have in your hand. “I’ll tap 3 mana,” you say, “and cast Cruel Finality to kill your Wheelsmith. That’ll be before you tap it as an attacker, right?”
“Right,” Avery says, dropping the Wheelsmith into his graveyard. “So it doesn’t trigger at all. No other responses?”
You scry into the top card of your library, see a Resourceful Return, and choose to leave it on top. You glance at the other cards in your hand, but decide not to play anything just yet. You shake your head.
“Okay,” Avery says.“I’ll attack with everything I have — except for the Crawler and the Colossus, of course.”
“Metalwork Colossus,” you point out.
“Stop that. You’re at three life, right?”
“Yeah,” you say, looking over your side of the table. With only three blockers against five attackers, the situation looks pretty bad for you. You really want to find a way out of this mess, not just because you want another game win this tournament, but also because it turns out that your opponent’s the type of person who plays Metalwork Colossus in a Sealed event.
“I said, stop that.”
“But I didn’t say anything!”
Avery glowers at you. “I can practically hear you thinking it,” he says.
It is the start of the combat phase on Avery’s turn; Avery has already declared his attacking creatures. Survive Avery’s turn, then find a way to defeat Avery before the end of your next turn.
You are at 3 life, with the following cards in play:
- Fairgrounds Trumpeter
- Lawless Broker
- Aetherborn Marauder
- Servo Schematic
- Durable Handicraft
- Renegade Freighter
- 5 Swamps (one tapped)
- 6 Forests (two tapped)
You have the following cards in your hand:
You currently have no energy counters.
You know the identity of the top card of your library, but otherwise do not know the identities or order of the remaining cards:
You have the following creature cards in your graveyard:
- Night Market Guard
- Scrounging Bandar
- Ridgescale Tusker
- Chief of the Foundry
- Fourth Bridge Prowler
- Maulfist Squad
- Scrounging Bandar
Avery is at 8 life and has no cards in his hand. He has the following cards in play:
- Gearshift Ace (tapped and attacking)
- Deadeye Harpooner (tapped and attacking)
- Salivating Gremlins (tapped and attacking as a 6/3 creature with trample)
- Bastion Enforcer (tapped and attacking)
- Filigree Crawler
- Enraged Giant (tapped and attacking)
- Metalwork Colossus
- Cogworker's Puzzleknot
- 6 Mountains (all tapped)
- 7 Plains (all tapped)
Avery currently has no energy counters.
If you think you’ve got a great solution in mind, don’t put it in the comments! Instead, send it to puzzles@gatheringmagic.com with the subject line “Puzzle — Larger than Life” by 11:59 P.M. EST on Sunday, January 29, 2017. We’ll include the best ones in next week’s article along with the next puzzle!
Last Week’s Puzzle
Some people had some very choice words for the situation at hand. “We're gonna struggle to fix this mess up,” Bill Murphy writes.“We can only attack for 5? Gross. We’d better wrangle us a ride out of this mess. If only the ship wasn't so big . . . ”
“Seriously,” Luke Paulsen continues, “Consulate Turret? Prizefighter Construct? Implement of Examination, Glassblower's Puzzleknot, and Watchful Automaton in a base-W/R deck? No wonder we're 0-3 so far — we either pulled the worst Sealed pool in the history of Magic, or did a spectacularly bad job of deck-building. But that's all in the past. What can we do to win from here?”
“First off,” Matthew Harvey writes, “we have to note that we just don't have enough power on the board to deal 11 damage in one hit. The strongest "creature" we have access to is the Consulate Dreadnought at 7 (or 8, once equipped with a pair of fancy Goggles), but only after it has been crewed. But the Dreadnought has a very steep crew cost of 6, and we only have one creature untapped and it has only 3 power. So can we crew the Dreadnought?
“Even if we could crew it, we would need to give it haste. The Wrangle on top of our deck can give something haste, but only for something with power 4 or less. So then . . . can we decrease the Dreadnaught's power before we attack? And then pump its power back up?”
“Of course, even if we can meet all the above conditions, that still leaves Sharon at 3. So we need 3 more damage from somewhere. We have 1 damage easily from our Implement of Combustion. But the last two will have to come from the Consulate Turret, and we need three energy to power it first. Can we find three energy?”
It turns out that we can do all this and more. Mike Ryan’s solution points out that there are some very tight interactions here:
- Cast the Consulate Dreadnought so that our opponent can see their doom coming. (Paying
.) - Cast Aether Tradewinds targeting our Foundry Assembler and Sharon’s Wind Drake. This sends our Aether Meltdown (and their Malfunction) to the graveyard. (Paying
.) - Cast Foundry Assembler channeling the spirit of Colin Mochrie to maximize our improv. (Paying and tapping Prophetic Prism, Inventor's Goggles, Consulate Dreadnought, and Implement of Combustion.)
- Crew the DOOMSHIP (aka Consulate Dreadnought). (Tapping Restoration Specialist and Foundry Assembler.)
- Sacrifice Restoration Specialist to return Aether Meltdown and Glassblower's Puzzleknot to your hand. (Paying .)
- Sacrifice our Implement of Combustion, dealing 1 damage to our very worried opponent, and drawing that Wrangle! Sharon is now at 10 life. (Paying .)
- Cast Glassblower's Puzzleknot and power up by gaining two energy counters. (Paying .)
- Cast Aether Meltdown on the DOOMSHIP, gaining two more energy counters. Look deep into our opponents’ eyes to see if she can comprehend her fate. (Paying .)
- Tap Consulate Turret to deal 2 damage to our opponent. She is now at 8 life.
- Cast Wrangle targeting the DOOMSHIP. Surely Sharon now knows her ultimate fate as we untap the mighty vessel and bestow it with haste. Suppress a cackle.(Paying .)
- Cast Fragmentize targeting our own Aether Meltdown — revealing the DOOMSHIP’s true power! (Paying .)
- Equip the DOOMSHIP with some fashionable Inventor's Goggles. No, it does not look silly. (Paying .)
- Enter Combat and attack with our 8/13 DOOMSHIP. Sharon’s only untapped creature, a Hinterland Drake, watches helplessly as an artifact creature sails past and deals lethal damage.
“The tricky part here,” Luke notes,“wasn't seeing the basic line of play — it was figuring out what to target with Aether Meltdown, what to get back with Restoration Specialist, and what to tap for the Improvise ability.”
“There were two things that I had to really grok in order to see this path,” Jenn O’Keefe writes.“One was the new vehicle mechanic:
- Crewing a vehicle does not force or initiate combat, and you can tap just-summoned creatures to pay crew costs. Once you jury-rig the Foundry Assembler back out, it can crew something.
- Best of all, once a crew cost has been paid, the crew members are free to do whatever else they can do while still tapped — including get sacrificed in the name of dumpster diving.
“The other thing I needed to grok was that it's perfectly okay to cast detrimental things on your own stuff sometimes:
- Using Aether Meltdown, Wrangle or Fragmentize on the Ironclad Revolutionary wouldn't result in enough damage.
- Using them on either Drake wouldn't do enough either, even by leaving no defenders so the Restoration Specialist could swing unanswered.
- There was no reason to cast a vehicle if I couldn't hurry it along. And despite the abundance of choices for other plays, there was only one way to get haste — I needed to Wrangle my own guy, which felt backwards since I already control my own stuff.
- And once committed to the Wrangle plan, I had to either pick someone with less than 4 power, or find a way to get someone below 4 power so that I could target it.
- Meltdown on my own ship felt REALLY cruel, especially since I was basically about to cripple it, subjugate it, put a splint on it, and chuck it out into harm's way. Then I remembered that only closers get prize-packs and got right over it.
There are some minor variations that can apply to the solution, as Jenn also notes:
- You could begoggle (Is that a word? –Ed.) the Dreadnought before wrangling it, for example — it would still be power 4 and eligible.
- You can fire the Consulate Turret anytime after you cast Meltdown (though I like the vicious poetry of leaving her alive after Das Boot does its work, only to zap her in the second main phase).
- You could even put off playing the Glassblower's Puzzleknot until the second main phase, though you'd be committed to firing your laser later that way.
And of course, attacking with only the Dreadnought has another advantage, as Michael Feldman writes: “If there's anything diplomatic about your behavior here, at least you had the decency to refrain from further degrading or stealing foreign troops.”
