In hindsight, it was the Unabridged Cube that gave you your first glimpse of From the Vault: Lore’s contents. The Unabridged Cube does that, of course — it’s a collection of one of each card ever printed (and some of which will be printed). But you’re getting ahead of yourself here.

You’re running a subpar U/R deck with some average-to-bad creatures and a few good spells. Surprisingly, it’s held up well against Quentin’s deck, even if his creatures are of far better quality. The strange thing is that your opponent seems to be playing a lot of mana-producers, far more than what you would normally expect from a draft deck.

When Quentin pointed a massive Drain Life at you a couple of turns ago, you immediately assumed that that was probably why he was playing Dark Rituals and Golgari Signets. You had to Delve your entire graveyard to counter the Drain Life, but you figured the action was worthwhile if it gave you a few more turns.

Unfortunately for you, Quentin followed that up with a Dark Depths (the From the Vault: Lore version, to boot), and immediately started removing ice counters from it. On his last turn, he drew and cast a Bubbling Muck, then paid 18 mana to empty the Depths and put Marit Lage into play!

Right until the Ice Age-block horror showed up, you thought you were mounting a fair defense. Quentin wasn’t able to get past your Saberclaw Golem, so you were waiting for a nice evasive creature to start chipping away at his life total. With Marit Lage in the mix, however, you’ve suddenly got a single turn to survive… and your next draw will have to be a really good one.

You pull a Temporary Insanity and immediately breathe a sigh of relief. Then you read the card a little more closely, and realize that it won’t be able to steal Marit Lage for you, you’ll need a grand total of 21 cards in your graveyard for the Insanity to do that, and you don’t even have that many cards in play!

So now you’re stuck in a dilemma, trying to figure out a way to salvage this game. Eventually you have to admit that you can’t win this in one go, you need to buy yourself some time to regroup. However, you can’t do that as long as Marit Lage is licking its lips at you from across the table. You’ll need to do something about that, you think.

It is the start of your first main phase. Remove Marit Lage from the battlefield before the beginning of Quentin’s next combat phase.

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

• Martyr of Ashes
• Cephalid Pathmage
• Grinning Ignus
• Petrahydrox
• Saberclaw Golem
• Dark Maze
• 4 islands
• 5 mountains
• Seafloor Debris

You have only one card in your hand:

• Temporary Insanity

You do not know the identities of the any of the next cards of your library.

You have only one card in your graveyard:

• Logic Knot

Quentin is at 17 life and has no cards in his hand. He has the following cards in play:

• Sylvan Caryatid
• Rib Cage Spider
• Faceless Butcher (exiling your Crested Craghorn)
• Jolrael, Empress of Beasts
• Durkwood Tracker (with your Slow Motion attached)
• Marit Lage token
• Charcoal Diamond (tapped)
• 8 swamps (all tapped)
• 4 forests (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 – It Came from the Depths” by 11:59 P.M. EST on Sunday, August 14, 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 Russell Jones, Aaron Golas, Ryou Niji, Dominic Chan, Matthew Harvey, Matt Vorpahl, Ira Herniter, David Jacobs, Kriz Lee, Michael Feldman, Miko Losantas, and Victor Munson.

“The title for the puzzle makes a sly hint,” Michael Feldman writes.“With so many options at your disposal, none of which include direct damage or life loss, and with only one piece of removal possible, a great strategy is to examine Anne's defenses for an in. From that angle, there aren't as many possibilities.

“One option is to take advantage of the fact that so many of Anne's creatures have 2 toughness, and Biting Rain seems to fit that perfectly. The problem with that is that it leaves you with a small pool of creatures, most of which have 0 power and collectively have no chance of dealing lethal damage.”

“I thought for sure the solution lay in Biting Rain,” Dominic Chan notes,“either by hard-casting it or discarding it for its madness cost. No matter how I approached it, though, I was a single point of life off from winning.”

Once you discount Biting Rain, this drastically reduces the number of legible options you need to try out. In fact, you have the seven damage you need on the table already: “Casting Wretched Gryff and giving it haste with Haunted Cloak will give you 7 power in the air, which is just enough to kill Anne,” Aaron Golas writes.“You just need to find a way past her flying blockers.”

Of course, without your lone bit of removal, you’ll need some help. “Vildin-Pack Outcast will require its own answer,” Aaron continues.“The pair of Moorland Drifters, meanwhile, can be brought to the ground by disrupting Anne's Delirium. As it turns out, she's hanging on to Delirium by a single enchantment, and you have a way to take it out.”

So with that in mind, we’ll look at Matt Vorpahl’s solution:

Note that you don’t have to place Rancid Rats and Biting Rain in your graveyard; you could place them on top of your library underneath Pick the Brain and Compelling Deterrence. The only card that you absolutely need to pitch into your graveyard via Contingency Plan is the Island.

Furthermore, the timing of your Compelling Deterrence is important: If you play it while your Stitched Mangler is still on the battlefield, Anne will discard the Senseless Rage you just bounced, and make it unavailable for Pick the Brain!

Pick the Brain may not be the most obvious way to secure a win, but it turns out to be instrumental in taking out your opponent here. There’s no way that Anne would have seen this coming, but sometimes you just have to go for the weakest link in the chain.