"Of course," Julius says.

"It's not like you're giving me much of a choice," you answer.

The strangest thing was that for one brief moment some time ago, you thought that this game was going in your favor. Between your Domesticated Hydra and Jolrael, Empress of Beasts, you had the board completely gummed up . . .  which allowed your small flyers to come in for two or three damage each turn.

As it turns out, a single Platinum Angel can ruin your day. You figure that it was about time you ran into one -- your local game store's Unabridged Cube has one of each card ever printed, and that includes reprints -- but you weren't expecting it to completely derail this game.

The worst part is that your deck doesn't have a lot of good removal available, so the best you've been able to do was to place a Yoke of the Damned on the Angel. Julius promptly negated the Yoke with a Gaea's Embrace, and he's been regenerating his win condition in response to all of your aura's triggers ever since.

You ran out of flyers a couple of turns ago, and since then you've been stalling off the back of a timely Moment's Peace. But you haven't found anything that permanently deals with the Angel yet, and your time is running out.

"Forest, go," Julius says.

You sigh once more. Normally you'd be happy at the fact that your opponent keeps drawing lands, but in this case, more Forests means more opportunities to keep his Platinum Angel alive. You untap your permanents, and hope to draw something that's more useful than the scraps you have on the table.

Interestingly enough, you do draw more removal -- of a sort. You brought in the little -- used Noxious Field from your sideboard to deal with Julius' Hornet Queen (which you haven't seen this game so far), but this is a strange time to find it in your hand.

"Did you just draw something that can stop my Angel?" Julius asks.

"What makes you say that?"

"I'm just asking. I had this feeling you might."

You glance at the board once more, and try to map out a plan in your head. The Noxious Field certainly won't do much by itself, but it might give you some options. After all -- all people, at some time, have to be the masters of their fates. And this seems like a particularly good chance for you to step up to the fore.

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

You are at 5 life, with the following cards in play:

• Quirion Ranger
• Moaning Wall
• Watchful Naga
• Domesticated Hydra (with your Bear Umbra attached)
• Jolrael, Empress of Beasts
• 3 Swamp
• 5 Forest
• Treetop Village

You have the following card in your hand:

• Noxious Field

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

Julius is at 6 life and has no cards in his hand. He has the following cards in play:

• Colorful Feiyi Sparrow (tapped)
• Thraben Valiant
• Steward of Valeron (with Julius' Iona's Blessing attached)
• Karametra's Acolyte
• Acid Web Spider
• Platinum Angel (tapped, with Julius' Gaea's Embrace and your Yoke of the Damned attached)
• 6 Forest
• 2 Plain
• Selesnya Guildgate

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 -- The Valiant" by 11:59 P.M. EST on Monday, July30, 2018. 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, Hyman Rosen, Bradley Dixon, Bruno Toledo, Paul Simpson, Sean Patrick Keatley, Justin Pflug, Ryland Foster, Ryou Niji, Addison Fox, Ben Jeffery, Russell Jones, Jack Zyhalak, Greg Dreher, Phil Barker, Florian Kupferschmid, Michael Reluzco, Stephen Gross, Marco Majoor, Matt Bocek, Aleksey Sorokin, Gene Beal, David Arnold, Darrell Tilley, Subrata Sircar, and Chris Billard.

There are two possible angles to this puzzle, one complicated and one not-so-complicated. "All things ignored (except for our side of the battlefield)," Paul Simpson writes, "we have the ability to draw two cards using Sai's activated ability:

• First activation: Sacrifice Rogue's Gloves and Diamond Mare (2 cards milled)
• Second activation: Cast Explosive Apparatus, create a Thopter token from Sai's trigger on casting the Apparatus. Sacrifice the Thopter token and the Apparatus to draw another card (2 more cards milled).

"This ain't going to cut it," Paul notes, "which, coincidentally, is where Stitcher's Supplier comes in."

The Stitcher's Supplier represents a huge chink in your opponent's armor, simply because you have so many ways to destroy it. Jack Zyhalak describes this most direct solution below:

The more complicated route, however, involves leaning on several draw effects and allowing Psychic Corrosion to do its job. "We need to sacrifice a total of four artifacts for two draws," Marco Majoor observes."We also need to have Sai die, and we need to have the Stitcher's Supplier die."

As an afterthought, this alternative also gains you a total of four life, as Ben Jeffery notes:

The lone card-drawing effect that you don't use here, in fact, is the one on Rogue's Gloves. But this latter solution does have a variant that opens up the possibility of getting the Gloves' triggered ability to take effect, as Chris Billard writes:

"Fortunately (for this problem only)," Ryou Niji notes, "Nexus of Fate cannot appear in a Core Set 2019 sealed pool, so our mill plan should not be stopped by any unexpected hate card."

"If this isn't Game 1," Norman Dean adds, "I'm rather surprised the Supplier is even in Zara's deck. It seems like a huge liability against a deck that is trying to mill you out!"