"Honored Hydra, go," Angie says.

"Seventeen, I think," Angie says. "To be honest, this isn't even one of my better games - I keep drawing my noncreature cards."

"Oh, okay. I don't suppose you're planning to move your Shielded by Faith."

"You wish," Angie says, smiling.

You shake your head. At first, you were confident that today's Unabridged Cube draft was going to be one of your better experiences: Your deck combines some nice removal spells with a number of efficient creatures, and includes a little graveyard recursion to boot. Unfortunately, Angie seems to have the perfect foil for your game plan: Her deck has more creatures than your removal can handle, and most of those creatures are bigger than yours. She even has a little bit of recursion herself, in the form of an Anurid Scavenger.

You drum your fingers on your Anje Falkenrath. That, at least, is your one plus for today: A number of Commander 2019 preview cards have finally started showing up in the Unabridged Cube. The chances of getting one are a bit slim - the Cube does have one of each card ever printed, after all - but you've had some good luck lately.

"I'll activate Anje Falkenrath in response," you say.

"I thought it was supposed to be pronounced like 'Ann-ye'," Angie says.

You glance at the card again. "Yes," you say, wondering what to make of her comment. "Well, maybe."

"They don't put pronunciation guides in the release notes, do they?"

"I don't think so."

"They should," Angie shrugs.

You turn back to the game. Having recently thrown your Moriok Replica in front of Angie's attacking Anurid Scavenger (and sacrificing the Replica for two cards), you're only too willing to discard the Mountain in your hand for something more useful.

Your Anje Falkenrath draw gives you a Grave Scrabbler, which you're happy to see: It'll get you a good use of Anje next turn, it'll let you retrieve something from your graveyard, and it'll act as additional fuel for the Scent of Nightshade in your hand... no matter how small the latter might be.

You move to untap your permanents, noting that Angie's Honored Hydra puts you in a predicament. So far, your Anaba Bodyguard has been able to hold off most of your opponent's creatures, particularly with the Fallen Ideal you attached to it. However, Angie is starting to reach a critical mass of creatures, and your life total is getting lower and lower from her Scavenger. It's pretty clear that Angie's going to unleash an alpha strike on you very soon, and you don't have a lot of ways to stop it.

You draw a Bone Harvest, which makes you wish it had a faster draw component. Still, the Harvest and the Scrabbler give you ample means to replenish your supply of creatures, and that should hold off Angie for a little longer. You just have to figure out what to do about her Anurid Scavenger in the meantime.

Then again, at least one other option comes to mind: If you can get past Angie's blockers and take her down from 13 life, you can start a new game and hopefully work with a better draw. You're not sure if you have the means to do so, though. Should you run the risk of an all-in play, or take the safer route?

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

You are at 8 life, with the following cards in play:

• Thunderscape Familiar
• Anje Falkenrath
• Spireside Infiltrator
• Anaba Bodyguard (with your Fallen Ideal attached)
• 4 Swamps
• 4 Mountains

You have the following cards in your hand:

• Grave Scrabbler
• Scent of Nightshade
• Bone Harvest

You have not yet played a land this turn. You still have a substantial number of cards remaining in your library, but you know neither the identities nor the order of those cards.

You have the following cards in your graveyard:

• Mountain
• Moriok Replica
• Lingering Phantom
• Beetleback Chief
• Terminate
• Hidden Horror
• Lava Coil
• Garna, the Bloodflame

Angie is at 13 life and has no cards in her hand. She has the following cards in play:

• Wall of Blossoms
• Kor Sanctifiers
• Anurid Scavenger (tapped, with Angie's Seeker attached)
• Student of Ojutai
• Cudgel Troll
• Watcher in the Web (with Angie's Shielded by Faith attached)
• Honored Hydra
• 4 Forests (three tapped)
• 3 Plains (all tapped)

Angie currently has no relevant cards in her graveyard, having recycled most of these via her Anurid Scavenger's ability.

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 - Make Up Your Mind" by 11:59 P.M. EST on Monday, August 19, 2019. 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 Jesse Robkin, Russell Jones, Sean Patrick Keatley, Max Bernstein, Addison Fox, Chad Salo, Hyman Rosen, Greg Dreher, Evan Thompson, Kirk Maijala, David Arnold, Chris Billard, Andre Nascimento, and Ross.

"There's a fairly obvious line at first glance," Addison Fox writes. "Quest for the Nihil Stone involves a loss of 5 life if we can somehow charge it up, so we only need to attack for 7. However, getting two quest counters onto it is going to be a heck of a trick, given that we only have one discard outlet and it's a death trigger, which we can't necessarily even get. But we can worry about that later; for now we'll try to get in for that seven."

"This is a tricky order-of-operations puzzle," Kirk Maijala notes. "Often the solutions start with tapping all your mana-producing permanents for mana and then doing a bunch of actions, but this one requires you to carefully think about exactly what you need to accomplish pre-combat. This is because you need to take some actions during combat to have enough Black mana to get everything done. It also requires careful stacking of death triggers to get everything in the right order."

Jesse Robkin's solution summarizes this nicely:

There are some very minor variations to this solution, the most notable one being that you can tap any other creature for Loam Dryad's ability as long as it isn't your Ana Disciple or animated Phyrexian Totem.

"The Phyrexian Totem is our MVP," Evan Thompson adds. "By the end of our solution, it serves three distinct functions: sac outlet, mana source, and attacker."

"I fully expect Nox to pay and sacrifice his Dawntreader Elk in response," Greg Dreher writes, "just to slow play his own defeat."