Editor’s Note: This puzzle has been corrected from its original version. We apologize for the inconvenience!

You sigh. It’s been a while since you’ve played against a Sliver deck, much less Vern’s three-color version. Now that you’re more than a few turns into the game, however, you find yourself just waiting for him to finish you off.

Vern taps 4 mana and casts a Toxin Sliver. “Not quite deathtouch, I’m afraid,” he chuckles. “What’s your biggest creature now?”

You glance at your side of the board. “Either my Mitotic Slime or my Stone Giant,” you say.

“I’ll have it exile the Slime, then. You say that that deck of yours is the one you made from the booster draft a while ago?”

“It won the booster draft a while ago.”

Vern smiles. “I should give this ‘Unabridged Cube’ of yours a try sometime,” he says.

“It’s got one of each card ever printed, so it gets interesting.”

“Even some of the new ones from Ixalan?”

“Even the new ones from Ixalan,” you answer sourly. The Unabridged Cube did mysteriously update itself with some of the new preview cards, as usual, but all you got from it was a reprint of Rootbound Crag.

To be fair, your game started out so well. You took out Vern’s Sinew Sliver and Muscle Sliver at the same time with a well-timed Jagged Lightning, stopping him from swarming you to death. You then drew and played a Pelakka Wurm to bring you back to a more comfortable life total and position yourself for a possible comeback.

Unfortunately, that’s when Vern drew his Constricting Sliver. Since then, he’s taken out every single one of your best creatures, leaving you with a significantly reduced board.

“I’ll end my turn,” Vern says.

“You’re not attacking?”

Vern shakes his head. “Not at your life total, and not if you can possibly block and kill a Sliver holding something I want to keep from you,” he admits. “I might as well sit here and wait for my Megantic Sliver.”

You glance at the substantial number of cards remaining in your library. “We might be here a while, then,” you say.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Vern says. “Why, I remember the time when I was playing this Cadaverous Bloom deck, and the Drain Life turned out to be the last card in my library . . . ”

As Vern drones on, you untap your lands and move to draw a card for your turn. Your deck blesses you with a timely Devour in Flames, which immediately makes you stop and think. Removal is always good, but how can you use it to turn this game around?

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

You are at 12 life, with the following cards in play:

• Feral Prowler
• Flowstone Channeler
• Kithkin Mourncaller
• Skirsdag Cultist
• Stone Giant
• 2 Mountains
• 4 Forests
• Rootbound Crag

You have the following card in your hand:

• Devour in Flames (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.

Vern is at 10 life and has no cards in his hand. He has the following cards in play:

• Gemhide Sliver (exiling your Ulvenwald Captive)
• Sentinel Sliver (exiling your Duplicant)
• Spinneret Sliver (exiling your Samut, Voice of Dissent)
• Syphon Sliver
• Horned Sliver
• Watcher Sliver
• Toxin Sliver (exiling your Mitotic Slime)
• Constricting Sliver (exiling your Pelakka Wurm)
• 2 Plains (one tapped)
• 1 Swamp (tapped)
• 2 Forests (both tapped)
• Blossoming Sands
• Jungle Hollow
• Rupture Spire

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 – Sliver of a Chance” by 11:59 P.M. EST on Sunday, September 10, 2017. We’ll include the best ones in next week’s article along with the next puzzle!

Last Week’s Puzzle:

“When it comes down to the age-old question of ‘U/B, or not U/B?’,” Allen Smith remarks, “it seems pretty clear where both we and Cécile stand. Attacking here is going to be difficult: We have fewer creatures, and none of ours naturally have evasion. One of them even has zero power.”

“This was a bit of a stumper at first,” Trevor Ferril adds. “I pieced together the solution once I started realizing the real objective and possibilities. I needed to deal 5 damage in combat, get Cécile's graveyard to seven cards, then destroy her Treacherous Vampire to do her in by its backstabbing bite.”

“With that said,” Christopher Castellon writes, “we need to get seven cards in Cécile's graveyard before we kill Treacherous Vampire, and we need to deal 5 additional damage somehow, so the Intimidate we get from Predator's Gambit is going to be super relevant.

“Since Reef Pirates will get a card into Cécile's graveyard for us, namely her Angler Drake, that's our candidate for the enchantment. However, that's still only 4 damage, so we're going to need to pull off some shenanigans to not only rid ourselves of any blue creatures on Cécile's side of the field, but also get the Exalted trigger from Frontline Sage. Then, before the Declare Blockers step, we need to rid ourselves of any remaining creatures on our side of the battlefield to get the Reef Pirates' damage and ability through.”

The problem, then, lies in how to get rid of almost all the creatures on your side of the table. “The mirror is one of the worst times to have a card that grants intimidate,” Addison Fox observes, “especially when it's only granted conditionally based on us having a lot smaller of a board than we have now. Two of our creatures have sacrifice abilities, and we can bounce a third, but that still leaves us with one additional fella that keeps us from being properly scary.”

This is where a certain Black Aura comes in. John Wolfe writes:

At this point, as Russell Jones writes, you can “sit still at the table with an anticipatory grin, until you bring out Cecile's best impression of Julius Caesar. There's no hurry; you've got all week, right?”

“For in that feast of dreams,” Norman Dean adds, “what death may come? Or something like that, anyway . . . ”