“You just need to calm down,” you tell her.

“Can you . . .  repeat the question?” Lois asks, burying her head in her hands.

“All I asked was whether or not you were attacking this turn.”

Lois throws her hands up in frustration. “This is hard,” she whines. “My sons never told me that this game was going to be this difficult!”

You don’t answer her, mostly because you weren’t expecting your games to be easy in the first place. After all, you’re playing Lois in the second round of your local game store’s Kaladesh draft, with a slight twist: With a shortage of stock in your area, you’re using one pack of Aether Revolt and two packs of Kaladesh today.

You won your first game handily, but your second game ran a lot longer than expected, with Lois’ controlling tendencies eventually coming out on top. With less than five minutes left to play your third and final game, both of you have been racing each other from the start. Now you’re trapped in a stalemate, however, and your judge called the end of the round some time ago — your five extra turns are almost up.

Lois finally shakes her head. “I’m not attacking,” she says. “But that’s only because of your Ballista Charger. I’ll go to my second main phase and just cast the Skyswirl Harrier I just drew. It’s your turn now.”

Lois blinks in frustration. “Sorry,” she says, “I should have asked. Are you going to play something?”

“How many extra turns do we have left?”

She glances at the judge, who holds up five fingers. “I’m in the fourth turn now, so your turn’s going to be the fifth and last one. What happens if one of us hasn’t won after you end your turn?”

“Then it’s a draw,” you explain. “Neither of us wins and neither of us loses.”

“Well,” Lois admits, “that doesn’t sound too bad.”

You inspect the cards in your hand once more, and then go over the cards on the table.

“You’re at 6 life, right?” you ask.

Lois visibly deflates at your question, and she buries her head in her hands once again. “You’ve got a way to win this game, don’t you?” she asks.

“I might.”

“Life is unfair,” Lois says.

Lois has just declared the end of her turn; you may still cast spells or activate abilities in response. Defeat Lois before your turn ends (and your match is declared a draw).

You are at 4 life, with the following cards in play:

• Ruinous Gremlin
• Aethertorch Renegade
• Fairgrounds Warden (exiling Lois’ Dawnfeather Eagle)
• Embraal Gear-Smasher
• Ballista Charger
• Cogworker's Puzzleknot
• Decoction Module
• 3 Mountain
• 4 Plains

You have the following cards in your hand:

• Conviction
• Acrobatic Maneuver
• Caught in the Brights
• Gremlin Infestation

You currently have no energy counters.

You do not know the identities or order of any of the remaining cards in your library.

Lois is at 6 life and has no cards in her hand. She has the following cards in play:

• Narnam Renegade
• Countless Gears Renegade
• Aetherstream Leopard
• Aether Inspector
• Peema Outrider (with a +1/+1 counter on it)
• Skyswirl Harrier
• Renegade Map
• 4 Forest (three tapped)
• 4 Plains (two tapped)

Lois 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 — Not the Boss of Me” by 11:59 P.M. EST on Sunday, February 5, 2017. We’ll include the best ones in next week’s article along with the next puzzle!

Last Week’s Puzzle

Correct solutions to last week’s puzzle were received from Aaron Golas, Matthew Harvey, Russell Jones, Greg Dreher, Addison Fox, Ryou Niji, Sean Dennehy, Paul Seitz, Hyman Rosen, Subrata Sircar, Will Clendenning, Rob Spremulli, Dominic Chan, Bill Murphy, and Luke Paulsen. Michael Feldman’s solution also comes really close.

This puzzle was apparently either easy or difficult, depending on how one approached it. “Often,” Addison Fox writes, “these puzzles involve going down a rabbit hole of aggressively unintuitive and cute plays, somehow culminating in a win due to a lesser-known corner case of two cards interacting. This puzzle isn't like that: You just make your good cards big enough to survive this combat, and then hit your opponent with them.”

The problem, however, centers on exactly how you do that. Using Hyman Rosen’s base solution, we have:

Aaron Golas notes that you can also cast Lifecraft Awakening with X=2 here. This makes the Servo Schematic a 2/2 creature (3/3 with Lifecrafter's Gift), which means that it’ll die in combat . . .  but you’ll get a 1/1 Servo token from its death, and when you do, you’ll have still available to pay for Durable Handicraft’s triggered ability.

Matthew Harvey brings this one step further: You can cast Lifecraft Awakening with X=1, making Servo Schematic a 1/1 creature (2/2 with Lifecrafter's Gift). Since the Schematic is expected to die in combat, you eventually end up with a 2/2 Servo token as well.

In fact, Greg Dreher indicates that you can cast Lifecraft Awakening with X=0! This would put Servo Schematic into your graveyard and give you a 1/1 Servo token immediately, but casting Lifecrafter's Gift on the Servo token would make this a 3/3 that can block Deadeye Harpooner and live. (Your 4/4 Aetherborn Marauder would block the 3/2 Bastion Enforcer instead.)

Hyman’s solution means that you can hit Avery for 14 damage (assuming that they block your largest attacker), but it’s worth noting that you’re still able to kill your opponent even if they have two blockers in play — they would take a minimum of 9 damage in that case. So technically you wouldn’t need to return the Fourth Bridge Prowler — you could bring back your Ridgescale Tusker for an effect similar to Durable Handicraft’s, for example, and still be able to use the Tusker to crew your Freighter.

Paul Seitz’s solution, on the other hand, takes a different route from the start:

From this point, using the Fourth Bridge Prowler / Durable Handicraft play will win you the game: You’ll be attacking with a 4/4 Fairgrounds Trumpeter, a 6/6 Aetherborn Marauder, and a 10/9 trampling Renegade Freighter. (The latter might even give you the added bonus of taking down the Metalwork Colossus.)

Dominic Chan notes that if you take this route, you can actually win without casting Resourceful Return at all:

Is it possible to kill the Metalwork Colossus, though? Russell Jones finds that the answer to this is “yes”, but it has an interesting requirement: You have to remove your own Aetherborn Marauder.