Anne is playing a deck that builds a significant board presence for both the early and the late game. However, she’s dependent on transforming cards for her midgame threats, and your removal has been making short work of them so far. Unfortunately, you don’t have much in the way of good creatures, and usually Anne ends up with a late-game basher you find difficult to take down.

With this being your third and final game, however, you’re a lot more prepared for Anne’s deck. After surviving her early rush, you settled into a good stalemate: Anne killed the Silburlind Snapper that you set up to block, but she’s been unable to get past your Silent Observer. Once you transformed your Curious Homunculus into a 3/4 creature, you had the distinct impression that the tide was turning in your favor.

On her turn, Anne taps 4 mana, attaches the Gryff's Boon in her graveyard to her Gatstaf Ravagers, and then attacks with the resulting 7/5 flying menace creature. At that point, you spring your trap: You discard a Murderous Compulsion to transform your Heir of Falkenrath, then pay its Madness cost to shoot down the tapped Ravagers.

If Anne is disappointed at the unexpected play, she doesn’t show it. Instead, she casts the last card in her hand, a Vildin-Pack Outcast, and reattaches the Gryff's Boon to it. You don’t have any further removal at this point, so you’ve now got a couple of turns to figure out how to deal with a potential 6/7 trampling flyer.

The Contingency Plan you draw at the start of your turn is one of the better cards you can expect, and you cast it at the first opportunity. Now you’re leafing through the top five cards of your library, trying to figure out your plan. You could shore up your creature base, you think, and try to overwhelm Anne’s defenses after a few turns. Or you could wipe out half the creatures on the table right now and then sort the ensuing mess out later.

Anne’s expression is starting to get rather oppressive, but you take a closer look at the cards anyway, and realize that you have a third option. Winning the game might be anticlimactic at this point, but hey, at least you won’t be the one ending up at 0-3.

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

You are at 9 life, with the following cards in play:

• Voracious Reader (with your Haunted Cloak attached)
• Heir to the Night
• Exultant Cultist
• Stitched Mangler
• Silent Observer
• 7 islands (one tapped)
• 5 swamps

You have the following cards in your hand:

• Cemetery Recruitment
• Wretched Gryff

You are currently resolving the Contingency Plan that you cast this turn, and must first choose between the following five cards on top of your library:

• Pick the Brain
• Rancid Rats
• Island
• Biting Rain
• Compelling Deterrence

As per the effect of Contingency Plan, you must choose any number of these cards and put them into your graveyard, then put the remaining cards back on top of your library in any order. You otherwise do not know the identities of the any of the next cards of your library.

You have the following cards in your graveyard:

• Murderous Compulsion
• Silburlind Snapper
• Certain Death
• Crow of Dark Tidings
• Gavony Unhallowed
• Murderous Compulsion

Anne is at 7 life and has no cards in her hand. She has the following cards in play:

• Furyblade Vampire
• Moorland Drifter
• Moorland Drifter
• Convicted Killer
• Militant Inquisitor (with Anne’s Senseless Rage attached)
• Vildin-Pack Outcast (with Anne’s Gryff's Boon attached)
• 7 plains (all tapped)
• 6 mountains (all tapped)

Anne has the following cards in her graveyard:

• Gatstaf Arsonists
• Humble the Brute
• Courageous Outrider
• Make Mischief
• Alchemist's Greeting
• Senseless Rage
• Deranged Whelp

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 — Weakest Link” by 11:59 P.M. EST on Sunday, August 7, 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, Russell Jones, Dominic Chan, Ryou Niji, Hyman Rosen, Matthew Harvey, David Jacobs, Aaron Golas, Miko Losantas, Kriz Lee, and Michael Feldman.

The blocking decisions involved in this puzzle were a problem for most people. As a result, the most common plan was to work backward, i.e. figure out how to win the game on your turn, then figure out how to get to those resources based on Mahsun’s attack.

“Assuming we don't die,” Hyman Rosen writes, “we're going to need some form of evasion to attack back for lethal, and we likely need to prevent lifelink from increasing our opponent's life total.

“Our choices for evasion are Stitchwing Skaab with flying, and Fogwalker with skulk. Our opponent has a creature with flying and another with reach, so flying seems out. For skulk to work, the low-power blockers must go away, which suggests getting Avacyn to transform. The fact that Fogwalker is 1/3, that Drogskol Shieldmate has flash and gives +0/+1 as an ETB effect, and that we have Just the Wind to bounce it, seems to indicate that we're on the right track.”

Dominic Chan continues: “First, we need to act on Faithbearer Paladin. If its damage is left unchecked, Lone Rider will transform. This presents us with two problems: if Lone Rider transforms, and Avacyn is set to transform as well, then Lone Rider will become a 4/4 that will live through Avacyn's cleansing. And it will have first strike and lifelink, making it near impossible to touch Mahsun's life total. Thus, to save us the headache, it would be best to either remove Faithbearer Paladin or remove the creature we use to block it, so that it deals no damage.”

All this leads to the following solution, as Matthew Harvey writes:

This solution highlights an interesting quirk in the rules: Your Paranoid Parish-Blade effectively becomes a 4/2 first-striker between the first strike and regular damage steps. Since it didn’t deal damage during the first strike damage step, it deals damage during the regular damage step.

The other interesting bit here, of course, is that it doesn’t matter how Mahsun distributes his Fibrous Entangler’s damage among your three blockers — Avacyn’s trigger will kill them all anyway, which is good news for you: You need the Cultist’s death trigger and the Chaplain’s graveyard ability.

There are variants to this solution, which are a lot more straightforward than the one above. You need to block Faithbearer Paladin with Drogskol Shieldmate, but the other blocking arrangements are more flexible:

In either situation, one of Mahsun’s creatures will die to trigger Avacyn’s ability — either the Fibrous Entangler or the Paranoid Parish-Blade. You won’t be able to discard any cards before damage resolution, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hardcast Just the Wind on your Shieldmate!

This just leaves one question, though: Did Mahsun make an error by choosing not to attack with his Runaway Carriage? Miko Losantas doesn’t think so: “With Avacyn, the Entangler, and the Lone Rider all set to transform if the Paladin connected, he did have the advantage and so could play it safe. He could have, however, taken into account the Runaway Carriage dying after combat, flipping Avacyn and dealing a few more points of damage.”

“Today's lesson,” Miko adds,“is to never underestimate the underdog. Especially the small evasive ones.”