Having gone 0-2 so far today, you now find yourself in the final stages of your third match. You’ve decided that if you lost this one, then you would simply go home and drown your sorrows in ice cream. Unfortunately, it now looks like you’re going to have to open that container of Triple Chocolate in your freezer.

Your opponent, Craig, has practically taken over the board in the last couple of turns. He’s playing a deck with a lot of Embalm and Eternalize effects, tying all those zombies together with cards like Lord of the Accursed, Binding Mummy, and Accursed Horde. You wonder how he made it to the 0-2 table, but maybe he’s just been as unlucky as you today.

You’ve managed to draw a lot of creatures and bring him down to a low life total thanks to your Rhonas's Monument. However, Craig has revealed some tricks of his own: You lost a Quarry Beetle to a surprise Saving Grace several turns ago, and then he played a second Saving Grace on his last attack to remove most of your remaining creatures.

With the last of his mana, Craig embalms an Oketra's Attendant from his graveyard, giving him a full complement of zombies. Unless you draw something really good, you’re not going to survive his next turn (and you’ll have to content yourself with frozen dairy desserts).

So you crack your knuckles, pray to whatever deities are watching your game at the moment, and draw . . .  a Sacred Cat.

Wait, that can’t be correct. You’re the hero of this story, right? So where’s the Hour of Revelation, Oketra's Last Mercy, or Dusk // Dawn you were supposed to draw? (Never mind that you have exactly none of these cards in your deck.)

You stare at the card in your hand for a while. You can’t remember if a Sacred Cat has ever won a game for you — or for that matter, anyone else — before.

You shake your head. All things considered, you’d rather have a match win over some ice cream. But maybe you have a way out of this mess, and maybe you don’t.

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

You are at 3 life, with the following cards in play:

• Hope Tender
• Mummy Paramount
• Dauntless Aven
• Mirage Mirror
• Rhonas's Monument
• 4 Forests
• 3 Plains
• Desert of the True
• Grasping Dunes

You have the following card in your hand:

• Sacred Cat

You have not yet played a land this turn. You do not know the identities or order of any of the cards remaining in your library.

Craig is at 4 life and has no cards in his hand. He has the following cards in play:

• Lord of the Accursed (tapped)
• Marauding Boneslasher (tapped)
• Trueheart Duelist zombie token (with two copies of Saving Grace attached)
• Oketra's Attendant zombie token
• Sunscourge Champion zombie token (tapped)
• 4 Plains (all tapped)
• 5 Swamps (all tapped)

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 — True Reflections” by 11:59 P.M. EST on Sunday, July 16, 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 Norman Dean, Russell Jones, Matthew Harvey, Allen Smith, Addison Fox, Ryou Niji, Julian Brunelle, Josh Tutt, Kim T.L, Greg Dreher, Aaron Golas, Mike Ryan, and Subrata Sircar. Michael Shoemaker’s solution also came quite close.

“This is an interesting situation,” Matthew Harvey writes.“Vanessa certainly has two very large creatures on the board, but only has those two creatures to block with. We, on the other hand, have four potential attackers plus the possibility of a fifth one thanks to Fame being able to give something haste. The only issue is that our creatures currently aren't big enough for lethal, so we need to make them bigger — and we have two ways of doing that.”

The easiest way to go about this is to go for a straightforward attack, as Allen Smith writes:

“Vanessa can block so that Scuttling Doom Engine would die,” Norman Dean adds, “but its trigger won't go on the stack until after damage has been dealt, at which point she would be too dead for it to do her any good. Besides, we have Elixir and two open mana.”

As effective as this approach would be, however, this doesn’t allow you to attack with a Dragon token . . .  and who doesn’t like attacking with a Dragon token? “Our rough plan,” Mike Ryan notes, “should be to get the Dragon from Awaken the Sky Tyrant online, give it haste, and attack with enough creatures to get past the remaining blockers with 9 damage.

“If we just attack with all of our creatures, though, we can expect that Reya Dawnbringer will block the Dragon, the Scuttling Doom Engine will block the Defiant Salvager, and we can only get 5 damage in. That's not enough, so we need that Scuttler gone . . .  and it is probably the only way to wake up the Dragon anyhow.

Your other consideration, of course, is that you need to gain life in order to survive the Scuttling Doom Engine . . .  but using the Elixir of Immortality may prevent you from using the Claim part of Claim // Fame. Kim T.L covers this one:

This approach has multiple variations. Julian Brunelle’s solution, for example, is a combination of both of the above:

“I would hate to break it to Vanessa,” Ryou Niji adds, “but Chord of Calling is an instant. Unless she expects something like Island and Spell Pierce, there is no reason not to at least wait until our combat step. And there is plenty of reason to wait: For example, any creature or artifact of converted mana cost 3 or less could turn into lethal damage.”