Locations
After burning through more than a few Shadows over Innistrad Booster Drafts, you found yourself in the finals match of your most recent eight-person pod. It’s your third and final game, and you’re not thinking straight anymore: For some reason, you decided to keep a five-land hand of cards with a Thornhide Wolves as your only creature.
It took you a long while to regroup, and Ming Han’s suite of removal and combat tricks weren’t helping. You remember seeing three Fiery Tempers from his deck in a previous game, so even if you’re looking at a stabilized board right now, your life total feels all too inadequate in the face of his potential draws.
On his last turn, your opponent plays a Highland Lake and then casts Pieces of the Puzzle, which nets him two spells: Malevolent Whispers and Dance with Devils. Ming Han starts tapping his lands but then stops suddenly.
“What is it?” you ask.
He gives you a disgusted look. “I don’t have enough lands,” he says.
You glance at his side of the table, and the fact suddenly dawns on you: Ming Han only has three untapped lands left and is unable to cast either of his spells. It’s a dim, although rather unexpected ray of hope.
“I end my turn then,” Ming Han says. “Having 20 life gives me a lot of time anyway.”
You crack open a Clue token to draw a Gryff's Boon, which isn’t too bad, but when you take your next draw step, you find a shiny new Reaper of Flight Moonsilver waiting for you on top of your library. That’s a major stroke of luck . . . if you can only figure out how best to use it.
It takes you a while to spot the opening, and although you take some time crunching the numbers in your head, everything seems to work out on paper. And that’s not a moment too soon—you’d rather not end your last match of the day taking a Fiery Temper to the face.
It is the start of your first main phase. Defeat Ming Han before the end of your next turn, and before he defeats you. (That is: You complete this turn, your opponent completes his turn, and then you win the game on your next turn.)
You are at 5 life with the following cards in play:
- Wild-Field Scarecrow
- Paranoid Parish-Blade
- Nearheath Chaplain (tapped, with Ming Han’s Sleep Paralysis attached)
- 4 Forests
- 4 Plains
You have the following cards in your hand:
You do not know the identities of any of the cards that are currently on top of your library.
You have the following cards in your graveyard:
Ming Han is at 20 life. He has the following cards in play:
- Gatstaf Ravagers (with your Bound by Moonsilver attached)
- Sanguinary Mage
- Sanguinary Mage
- 3 Islands (two tapped)
- 3 Mountains (one tapped)
- Highland Lake (tapped)
Ming Han has the following cards in his hand from the Pieces of the Puzzle that he cast last turn:
Ming Han has the following cards in his graveyard:
- Just the Wind
- Fiery Temper
- Jace's Scrutiny
- Deny Existence
- Dissension in the Ranks
- Pieces of the Puzzle
- Mountain
- Niblis of Dusk
- Island
If you think you have a great solution in mind, don’t put it in the comments! Instead, send it to puzzles at gatheringmagic dot com with the subject line “Puzzle — Out of Nowhere”. 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, Ryou Niji, Aaron Golas, David Jacobs, Andrew Muravskyi, Quadrangolo Tetra, Travis Brown, Matthew Harvey, Victor Munson, Bohdan Yarema, Austin Callison, Alex van der Bie, Kriz Lee, Nick Fera, Chadwick Bond, and Alexander Breuers.
“Whitney is at virtual 4 life thanks to Alms of the Vein,” Andrew Muravskyi notes, “and the remaining 1 damage can be dealt by Gibbering Fiend, which can serve as our coup de grâce. We're 3 damage short, and this can only be found in combat, but Watcher in the Web is an absolute wall. The only way around him is the skulk ability.”
“To deal 7 damage,” Alex van der Bie adds, “the only way is to somehow attack for 3 with a skulk creature. This means both you and your opponent have to reach delirium—you to make the Fiend active and the opponent to prevent Moldgraf Scavenger from blocking. The final piece of the puzzle is the realization that you can use Dead Weight on your own creature to shrink it and have the opponent not block it due to skulk.”
Alex’s solution goes as follows:
- Cast Essence Flux, targeting Tooth Collector, giving -1/-1 to Groundskeeper (giving delirium to your opponent and making her Moldgraf Scavenger a 3/4).
- Cast Dead Weight, targeting Twins of Maurer Estate.
- Equip Skeleton Key to Twins of Maurer Estate. It is now a 1/3 creature with skulk.
Or how the twins of the Maurer estate decided to go to grandma’s house for a picnic. They put on their favorite red cloaks and grabbed the key to her house. They also decided to bring their picnic basket full of goodies for grandma.
- Cast Shamble Back, targeting Niblis of Dusk, making a 2/2 Zombie token for your trouble.
- Attack with the Twins. Your opponent can't block because she doesn't have any creatures with power 1 or less.
So the little red riding hoods reaches grandma’s house, and it turns out that grandma has one heck of a security system.
- After blockers, cast Compelling Deterrence, targeting your own Dead Weight. You must discard a card because you control a Zombie.
- Discard Alms of the Vein to the Deterrence, paying its madness cost to make your opponent lose 3 life.
- Twins deals 3 damage to your opponent. You draw a card and discard Welcome to the Fold, paying its madness cost and targeting Gibbering Fiend.
- After combat, cast Dead Weight targeting your own Tooth Collector. Both go to the graveyard, giving you delirium.
- Pass the turn. On Whitney's upkeep, Gibbering Fiend deals 1 damage to her, killing her in the process.
And when he opened it, he was attacked by a ravening fungus that ate him whole. When his eleven-o'-clock patient—another Planeswalker with a toothache—heard the news, he was prescribed morphine and laudanum, which led to his own bout of delirium. The end.
A variant of this solution exists. “When typing this solution,” Ryou Niji points out, “I noted that Shamble Back is not really necessary. What the Zombie does is just to give us another discard outlet in Compelling Deterrence; but we could also cast Alms of the Vein off the Skeleton Key trigger and hard-cast Welcome to the Fold for 
(instead of paying 
for its madness cost).” From here, you can cast Dead Weight to kill a creature for delirium and the win.
Curiously, this win would not have been possible if your opponent had taken a different route. “It's a good thing for us that Whitney returned Burn from Within to her hand and not Confront the Unknown with Seasons Past,” Aaron Golas observes. “A simple +1/+1 could have saved her Groundskeeper from death and unraveled our plan!”
“Frankly,” Chadwick Bond adds, “it would have been very difficult for us to lose that game, even if we hadn't seen the immediate win. We had Dead Weight, Welcome to the Fold, Compelling Deterrence, and the combo of Essence Flux and Tooth Collector to deal with Whitney’s creatures, Shamble Back and Alms of the Vein to gain us enough life to last a few turns, and enough ways to produce Clues to give us more card advantage. While Whitney has some great cards in hand, she just barely has enough mana to cast two of them in one turn. We definitely had the edge there.”
