Now in your third round, you find yourself paired against Bess, who admits this is her first tournament in five years. “You would have hardly recognized me the last time I played,” she tells you. “I was all hair dye and mascara back then.”

“So what convinced you to play in this one?” you ask.

“I heard they were returning to Innistrad. I missed most of the original block, and I thought I shouldn’t miss this one.”

“True enough,” you say, glancing at the table. The board has been gummed up for more than a few turns now, and Bess only recently broke the stalemate by casting a Nephalia Moondrakes. She then attacked you with a flying 5/5 Laboratory Brute, leaving your life totals even at 4 each.

“I was hesitant when I first heard about Shadows of Innistrad,” Bess continues, “and I got to thinking things like, ‘who’s gonna take care of the baby while I’m off’, or ‘do I still remember how to play’.”

“But you still came,” you say.

“Darn right. I told myself that no one was gonna drag me up here, and I had to want to play.”

At the beginning of your upkeep, you resolve your Crop Sigil’s trigger, which mills a Swamp off the top of your library. You then draw your card for the turn, which happens to be an Avacyn's Judgment. “So how’s it been so far?” you ask.

“Great!” Bess smiles. “I even pulled a foil Jace from one of my packs. It’s just been . . .  happy. That’s it, really. I am happy now.”

You’re not too surprised at that, especially considering that she’s likely to win with the Moondrakes next turn. You search the board, looking for something that’ll open up your eyes to a solution.

Eventually you find it in one of the strangest of places. But as they say, a win is a win.

It is the start of your first main phase. Defeat Bess before the start of her next combat phase.

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

You have the following cards in your hand:

• Borrowed Malevolence
• Strange Augmentation
• Avacyn's Judgment (drawn during your draw step this turn)

You have not yet played a land this turn. You have twelve cards remaining in your library, of which seven are basic lands: three Swamps, three Mountains, and one Forest. However, you do not know the identities of any of the top cards of your library.

You have the following cards in your graveyard:

• Swamp
• Sanitarium Skeleton
• Insatiable Gorgers
• Falkenrath Reaver
• Vessel of Malignity
• Boon of Emrakul
• Brazen Wolves

Bess is at 4 life and has no cards in her hand. She has the following cards in play:

• Thraben Inspector
• Geist of the Archives
• Exultant Cultist
• Ingenious Skaab
• Laboratory Brute (tapped, with Faith Unbroken attached, exiling your Assembled Alphas)
• Courageous Outrider
• Nephalia Moondrakes
• 3/2 Eldrazi Horror token
• 6 plains (four tapped)
• 6 islands (three 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 — Signs of the Times” by 11:59 P.M. EST on Sunday, July 24, 2016. 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, David Jacobs, Aaron Golas, Dominic Chan, Matt Vorpahl, Ryou Niji, Russell Jones, Chris Umstadter, Hyman Rosen, Rob Vary, Subrata Sircar, Matthew Harvey, Daniel Gutierrez, Bill Murphy, Michael Feldman, Kriz Lee, and Andrew Muravskyi.

“We meet again, Willbreaker,” Matt Vorpahl writes. “Or rather, you get to sit in our hand. I was trying to figure out a way to use all three cards in our hand to win, but we don't have enough Blue mana to make that work. So we need to figure out a solution that doesn't involve taking Nox's stuff.”

Chris Umstadter continues: “I figured out pretty quickly that the Willbreaker / Prodigal Sorcerer / Noxious Dragon mix was a trap: No matter how smoothly you can take control of everything, you won’t have enough flying damage on the board. I concluded that the safe bet was to use Lashweed Lurker’s Emerge cost to get a Clue token and transform the Daring Sleuth, and then cast Clash of Wills to transform the Docent of Perfection.

“I got hung up on the mana, though: I was trying to return and recast the Leaf Gilder, and was always coming up short. But the Copperhorn Scout was a bigger part of the solution than I realized — even though the Prodigal Sorcerer would be untapped from the attack trigger on the Scout, it wouldn’t remove him from combat! So not only could I tap him a second time, but I could also return the Copperhorn Scout to my hand for Wirewood Symbiote between the attack and combat damage steps.”

As it turns out, Daring Sleuth is a Human Wizard in its transformed state. This gives us a rather interesting solution, as Rob Vary notes:

One variant of this solution involves targeting Wirewood Symbiote with Lashweed Lurker’s ability. That way, Dominic Chan points out, “Instead of drawing a random card, you could draw and recast Wirewood Symbiote, then reactivate its ability in the same turn because it becomes a new object when you cast it.”

After all that, it may come as a surprise that a Willbreaker solution exists. “It turns out that Willbreaker works really well with triggered ‘may’ abilities, like the good old Willbreaker + Throwing Knife interaction from Origins limited,” Andrew Muravskyi writes.

As Lashweed Lurker’s ability is a “may” ability, you have some workable room here. Subrata Sircar explains:

“If these puzzles have taught me anything,” Dominic adds, “it’s to look for solutions in the most unconventional places. Nox tried to break us, but we created the perfect storm to obliterate him.”