“You’re not attacking with all of your creatures?” you ask.

“Not with all those tricks in your deck, I’m not.”

You shrug. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

“I must be cruel only to be kind,” she answers.

“Playing against the twins has made you overly cautious,” you mention.

“The less said about them, the better,” Cécile says.“It’s nothing either good or bad — but thinking makes it so. And besides, we’re both playing Dimir. You’ve probably got as much nasty stuff in your deck as I do.”

You glance at the cards in Cécile’s graveyard, and have to agree.

You have to admit that it’s a strange coincidence. Today’s Unabridged Cube draft did have an abnormally high number of Blue and Black cards, so perhaps the distribution got skewed at some point. The Cube does have one of each card ever printed, after all.

“I’ll activate my Frontline Sage first,” you say, drawing a card and discarding a useless Vampiric Spirit.

“Are you using that Neurok Replica of yours?” Cécile asks. “My Angler Drake is dealing lethal damage.”

“Not at all,” you say.

“Then what . . . ”

“I’m casting Griptide on it,” you laugh, tapping four lands and casting your instant spell.

“I see that you can smile and be a villain at the same time,” Cécile sighs, putting her Angler Drake on top of her library.

“To thine own self be true,” you say.

Cécile taps five lands and casts the last card in her hand, a Treacherous Vampire. “That’s all for my turn,” she says. “You can delay it as much as you want, but you’re still going to have a 4/4 flyer coming at you, I suppose.”

“Conscience does make cowards of us all,” you say, untapping your permanents.

“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.”

Your draw is a curious one: Feast of Dreams, which goes well with the Predator's Gambit in your hand and the Screams from Within you have in play. You have to admit that Cécile’s right, though: You’re likely to meet your outrageous fortune at the hands of either her Treacherous Vampire or her Angler Drake, and the only thing you’re able to do at this point is buy some time.

Then again, you haven’t shuffled off this mortal coil just yet, and perhaps there’s a method in this madness. But what could it be?

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

You are at 4 life, with the following cards in play:

• Frontline Sage
• Neurok Replica
• Reef Pirates
• Nekrataal
• Phyrexian Defiler
• 5 Islands
• 4 Swamps

You have the following cards in your hand:

• Predator's Gambit
• Feast of Dreams (drawn during your draw step this turn)

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

Cécile is at 11 life and has no cards in her hand. She has the following cards in play:

• Azure Mage
• Pale Rider of Trostad
• Xathrid Necromancer
• Dream Prowler (with your Screams from Within attached)
• Whitewater Naiads
• Treacherous Vampire
• 3 Islands (two tapped)
• 4 Swamps (three tapped)

The top card of Cécile’s library is an Angler Drake.

Cécile has the following cards in her graveyard:

• Sorin's Thirst
• Tightening Coils
• Dark Banishing

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 — Not to Be” by 11:59 P.M. EST on Sunday, September 3, 2017. We’ll include the best ones in next week’s article along with the next puzzle!

Last Week’s Puzzle

The original version of this puzzle had a Scavenger Drake on Bram’s side of the table, but this resulted in a scenario where it was impossible for you to win if Bram chose not to take advantage of the Drake’s “may” ability. The Drake was therefore replaced with a Swarm of Bloodflies to make sure that a solution exists.

Exactly how to win is another matter altogether. “20 life is an awful lot,” Addison Fox writes, “especially with the number of blockers at Bram's disposal. There are only two things on the board with the potential to grow big enough to win this turn, and we don't control either of them: Mirror Entity can let Bram turn their entire team into 5/5 or 6/6 or 9/9 monsters, and Swarm of Bloodflies can turn a few removal spells or a good combat step into being a suddenly lethal threat all on its own.”

“Swarm of Bloodflies stands out for three reasons,” Ryou Niji continues.“It grows, it flies, and if we don't steal it, it's a flying blocker. Pawn of Ulamog could give us a large number of creatures to sacrifice . . .  if we have any sort of sacrifice outlet to begin with. But Mirror Entity is sort of a mass sacrifice outlet, helps with the problem of how to steal two creatures with Captivating Vampire, and happens to be a generic mana sink too!”

The result is a setup where you end up stealing Mirror Entity and activating it multiple times. Matthew Harvey refers to this as “Vampires sire vampires who sire even more vampires,” and that’s not too far off the mark.

Danny Dellinger’s solution goes as follows:

This sequence leaves you with two untapped lands, but there’s nothing stopping you from activating Mirror Entity for eight instead and attacking with the Swarm as a 22/22.

Note that anything that Captivating Vampire steals becomes a Vampire itself, so you can activate Olivia's Bloodsworn’s ability targeting the Swarm of Bloodflies once you steal it. Even if it didn’t, you could always activate Mirror Entity for zero immediately afterwards and get the same result.

“Bram's fatal mistake was in his last turn,” Addison notes, “though I'm sure he didn't even realise it. If he had swung out last turn, Mirror Entity would have made all of their creatures lethal threats; six attackers to six blockers means that even if we steal one, we would need to do so after blocks and still lose most of our board.”

Under normal circumstances, there would also be a remote possibility that Bram could activate his Mirror Entity for zero in response to your attempt to steal it. “Luckily,” Matthew continues, “the Glorious Anthem would keep Bram from doing this (and killing all their creatures in the process).”

In the end, however, Bram has to content himself with watching a win materialize from nowhere. That, and as David Arnold writes, “Bram must be stoked to play against a vampire deck.”