"Aaaand we're done," James says.

Mari glances at the table. "That's all you're doing?" she asks. "Attacking with Aerial Responder and casting Spirit of the Hearth?"

"Don't need to do anythin' else, darlin'."

Mari lapses back into thought, but you can already see where her opponent is going wrong. He obviously has the advantage and is just toying with Mari now, but the problem with doing that is that it just gives your friend more time to find an out.

Still, you have to admit that James is quite far ahead: His Aerial Responder has been making regular attacks for some time now, and its lifegain has only been recently nerfed by Mari's Rampaging Ferocidon. On top of that, Mari is now at a mere one life - and considering her lack of flying blockers, the Responder and the Spirit of the Hearth are capable of ending this game at any time.

"Okay," Mari says. "I'll start my turn then. What's your life total?"

James smiles. "Eighteen," he says.

"I used my Viashino Fangtail to ping you in response to your casting Spirit of the Hearth," Mari points out. "You should be at seventeen."

James pauses, then taps his phone once. "Sure," he says. "Whatever you say, darlin'."

You find yourself wondering exactly what's happening here, and two possibilities come to mind: Either Mari's waiting for the right moment to spring something unexpected on her opponent, or she's absolutely dead in the water. That's one thing with your local game store's Unabridged Cube, which contains one of each card ever printed: It's difficult to read board states sometimes, and a battlefield that's clearly in favor of one player can find itself completely overturned in the space of a few minutes.

Mari untaps her permanents, then reaches into your dice bag for a token. "Let me borrow this for a second," she says, placing it on her Hasran Ogress.

"Go ahead," you say, then return to holding your breath. A lot is riding on this draw step.

Mari draws an Orcish Artillery and gives it a critical look. You shake your head; with Mari unable to cast it because of her Ferocidon's ability, that might as well be the game right there.

Mari glances at her opponent. "So you're at seventeen," she repeats.

"Yep."

"And I'm at one?"

"Yep."

"And this is our third game," Mari adds.

"Yep. You sayin' good game?" James asks.

"Not yet," Mari says. "Advantage aside, it was a good game, though."

"My pleasure, darlin'."

"Now let me see if this works," Mari says. She motions toward her cards, and you smile. For all his positioning, you figure that James is suddenly about to have a really bad time.

It is the start of your first main phase. Defeat James before the beginning of his next combat phase.

You are at 1 life, with the following cards in play:

• Priest of Forgotten Gods
• Lightning Mauler (with your Sword of Feast and Famine attached, and paired with your Hasran Ogress)
• Goblin Cratermaker
• Hasran Ogress (with a -1/-1 counter on it, your Glistening Oil attached, and paired with your Lightning Mauler)
• Rampaging Ferocidon
• Viashino Fangtail
• 4 Swamps
• 6 Mountains

You have the following card in your hand:

• Orcish Artillery

You have not yet played a land this turn. You still have a substantial number of cards remaining in your library, but you know neither the identities nor the order of those cards.

James is at 17 life and has no cards in his hand. He has the following cards in play:

• Narnam Renegade
• Serene Master
• Thorn Lieutenant
• Aerial Responder
• Signpost Scarecrow
• Hungry Mist
• Phyrexian Swarmlord
• Spirit of the Hearth
• 6 Forests (five tapped)
• 3 Plains (all tapped)

Neither you nor James currently have any poison counters.

If you've got a solution in mind, don't put it in the comments! Help keep this puzzle a mystery to other readers!

Instead, if you think you've got a great solution, you can send your solution to puzzles@gatheringmagic.com with the subject line "Puzzle - Hearth of the Swarm" by 11:59 P.M. EST on Monday, March 9, 2020. 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 Russell Jones, Greg Dreher, Jacob Butcher, Fernando Gutiérrez Saldate, Jonah Comstock, Jose Tavarez, Michael Feldman, and Hyman Rosen.

"At first, the puzzle looks easy," Greg Dreher writes. "Since Infernius Spawnington III, Esq. deals a total of 12 damage, and Trinity is at 12 with no way to block flying creatures, you can just discard and reanimate it. Unfortunately, her Fell Specter would then kill you."

"Solving this puzzle required noticing that Mistmoon Griffin puts the topmost *creature card* into play," Jacob Butcher notes, "which means that as long as the other graveyard cards aren't creatures, Vampire Nocturnus is accessible and so is its helpful 'reveal' ability. We can easily exile three creatures from the graveyard, so it's just a matter of getting two non-creature cards into the graveyard."

One of these two non-creature cards - the otherwise-useless Gruesome Deformity - is readily available: All you have to do is pop it onto a creature, then sacrifice that creature to Blood Bairn. The second card, however, is more difficult to find:

On top of all this, your Cabal Inquisitor adds an additional restriction: Its ability can only be activated at sorcery speed, so you can't pull off the trick of getting Brilliant Halo into your graveyard for threshold, then activating the Inquisitor in response.

In the end, however, the path forward involves no complicated tricks - just some insight as to how the cards on the table can work. Jose Tavarez writes:

Of course, it's entirely possible that you can whiff all three reveals this way - the next three cards of your library could all be White creatures, for example. What's important here, though, is that you've revealed three cards so far this turn, which means that the Infernius Spawnington III, Esq. in your hand is now subject to a massive cost reduction. Michael Feldman caps this off with:

Now that we've mentioned Sultai Emissary, though, there's also an alternative solution to this puzzle that relies on a read of the Comprehensive Rules. Specifically, the following:

...

There aren't a lot of rulings floating around for Un-cards, but a straight read of the above implies that revealing a manifested permanent could qualify for the beastly demon's discount. Jonah Comstock therefore points out that our solution could possibly be as simple as the following: