"Wait, wait," you say, glancing at the notepad in front of you. "How could he have a Vow of Malice enchanting your Forest?"

"Oh yeah," CJ says. "I forgot about the Awakener Druid. I cast it the turn after Steve took out my Dragonlord Dromoka with an Eviscerate, you see. The Druid turned my Forest into a 4/5 creature, and he stuck the Vow of Malice on it during his next turn. Now that I think about it, though, he also had a Scion of Glaciers that could block."

Mari scratches her head. "This is really confusing," she says. "I can't figure out what's going on with your Unabridged Cube draft match if you keep adding new cards to the table!"

"We're coming to the best part now, I swear," CJ says. "So on his turn, Steve draws his card and plays a land."

"That was the highlight of your game?" you ask.

"Shut up," CJ says, grinning. "Steve then taps one and sacrifices his Relic of Progenitus to wipe out both of our graveyards and draw a card."

"That explains why you have a big red 'X' under 'Graveyard' here," Mari says, inspecting the notepad. "At least we now know what happened to Dragonlord Dromoka."

"But then," CJ says, "it turns out that his draw was a Baleful Strix, so he taps two lands to cast that, and then draws another card."

"And this one was the Demon of Death's Gate?" you ask.

"He hardcasts a Demon of Death's Gate!" CJ says. "I'm amazed he had the mana for it!"

"This is a Cube that has one of each card ever printed, so I wouldn't be surprised if some games go long enough to gather a boatload of lands."

"These notes say that your opponent had a Highborn Ghoul on his side," Mari says. "I would have thought he'd attack with it."

"Steve did," CJ admits. "It was before he cast the Demon, I think."

Mari grumbles and writes down this new detail. "Any other things you're not telling us, CJ?" she asks.

"I was a man barely alive at this point," CJ says, "so I was really sweating this. I thought that my next draw was going to make or break this game. It turned out to be an Ashnod's Transmogrant!"

You glance at the notepad over Mari's shoulder. "That thing that turns creatures into artifacts?" you ask.

"Yeah," CJ says, "and I was still holding onto a Gleeful Sabotage! So on my turn, I just cast the Transmogrant, sacrificed it to make the Demon into an artifact creature, and then cast the Sabotage to destroy it!"

You chuckle. "I have to admit that was a little funny," you tell him. "It's a good thing you were able to win that game by the skin of your teeth."

"What do you mean?" CJ asks.

"You did win the game, right?"

"Nope," CJ shrugs. "On his next turn, Steve drew a Drain Life and plugged me with everything he had. But that play that got rid of the Demon was pretty cool, huh?"

"So in the end, you still didn't win?" Mari interjects.

"Hey, sometimes getting rid of a huge Demon is enough to make your day."

Mari glances back at the notepad. "Are you sure you have everything written down here, CJ? Every little detail?"

"Yeah, that should all be correct now," CJ says. "That's how it looked just before I cast the Ashnod's Transmogrant."

Mari catches your eye and sighs. "I guess you don't want to hear this, then," she says.

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

You are at 6 life, with the following cards in play:

• Ulvenwald Tracker
• Tragic Poet
• Leonin Squire
• Awakener Druid
• Tanglewalker (with a +1/+1 counter on it)
• Teshar, Ancestor's Apostle (with a +1/+1 counter on it, and your Lightning Greaves attached)
• Oath of Ajani
• 3 Forest (one animated as a 4/5 green Treefolk creature by Awakener Druid, and with Steve's Vow of Malice attached)
• 6 Plains (one with your Nylea's Presence attached)
• Selesnya Sanctuary

You have the following cards in your hand:

• Ashnod's Transmogrant
• Gleeful Sabotage

You have not yet played a land this turn. You know neither the identities nor the order of the cards remaining in your library.

You currently have no cards in your graveyard.

Steve is at 11 life and has no cards in his hand. He has the following cards in play:

• Oona's Gatewarden
• Baleful Strix
• Highborn Ghoul (tapped)
• Grim Guardian
• Aven Fleetwing
• Scion of Glaciers
• Scrounger of Souls
• Demon of Death's Gate
• 4 Island (all tapped)
• 8 Swamp (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 - We Have the Technology" by 11:59 P.M. EST on Monday, August27, 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 Addison Fox, Hyman Rosen, Matt Bocek, Robert Smith, Ryou Niji, Russell Jones, Sean Patrick Keatley, David Arnold, Chris Billard, and Alex Buckner.

"With Tally at 15," Addison Fox writes, "getting in through combat damage is going to be a big task. We have at most a 4-power creature, and we can only make one unblockable since we need to discard a card to activate the Key to the City. However, Flamewave Invoker (while expensive) is a very good way to send some love straight to the dome, and Dross Scorpion and Basalt Monolith give us a very good way to generate a decent amount of mana."

"When faced with a board state this complex," Ryou Niji notes, "the first thing to do is to figure out the ways to actually get any damage through. In this case, there are three:

"The 'ramp really hard to use Flamewave Invoker twice' approach is probably the most simple solution, since that source of damage has a lot less moving parts. Instead of caring about creatures, all we need to do is to make a ton of mana."

This turns out to be straightforward, and Matt Bocek notes that the easiest solution seems to be:

This approach allows you to mix and match your options. You could, for example, use Master Transmuter to "blink" your Basalt Monolith, tap Sparksmith to kill Master Transmuter, and then activate Orcish Bloodpainter to kill Dross Scorpion. One particularly uncommon move involves activating Master Transmuter to return Phyrexian Metamorph to your hand, return the Metamorph to the battlefield without copying anything, then trigger Dross Scorpion upon its death.

The ability to "blink" your own Phyrexian Metamorph, however, brings about several additional possibilities. Several solutions pointed out that if you're leaning on Dross Scorpion's triggered ability so much, you might as well give yourself two of them. Hyman Rosen describes this route as follows:

The nice thing about this approach (as well as others) is that it leaves you with some excess mana in your pool. This, mind you, is just enough to add insult to injury: In response to Flamewave Invoker's last activation, you can simply pay mana and untap Basalt Monolith.