You glare back at Nox, and he grins. "That's... a great draw," you say.

"Tick tock," he answers, now gesturing toward your graveyard.

You move your only flyer off to the side, and Nox immediately taps his Goldnight Castigator. "That's my attack," he says. "Of course, you knew that was coming."

"Yeah," you say. "Yeah, I suppose so."

The Unabridged Cube is in fine sadistic form at the moment, putting you at a disadvantage for most of the game while making you think you can work your way out of your situation. What's worse is that you're playing against Nox, of all people: You'd personally like to live the rest of your life without ever running into him again, but that would be a massive kindness.

Nox has been looking for a way to break through your defenses for a while now. At first he was able to get a couple of hits with a Corpulent Corpse out of suspension, but a Metamorphic Alteration on your Boreal Druid closed that door. Nox has some good-sized creatures as well, but it turns out that your Carnivorous Plant is really good against ground-based forces, and your Phytotitan can play some decent recurring defense.

All that, however, leaves his Goldnight Castigator... and unfortunately for you, your transformed Aberrant Researcher was the only thing standing in its way.

"Take five?" Nox asks.

"Yeah, a break would be nice."

Nox gives you a withering look. "What I meant was, you take five damage."

You sigh. "I'll go down to five life, then," you say, marking it down on your scorepad.

Nox straightens up. "It's your turn," he says. "I'd like to see what you have now."

What you have, for that matter, is a Barrin's Unmaking that you're regretting ever shuffling into your deck. It's spent more than a few turns sitting in your hand looking for a legal target, and it's living proof that a Cube that has one of every card ever printed won't guarantee that all of them are playable.

You untap your permanents and peel a Cytoshape from the top of your library. This, at least, looks somewhat usable. But Nox is at a distant eight life, and you're still not sure how you can get past his blockers beyond your solitary Dream Prowler.

Nox grins once more, looking as though he's reading your mind. "You can go ahead and attack with your Dream Prowler," he offers. "One damage won't make much of a difference."

"Two damage," you point out.

"Two damage?"

"Er... your Goldnight Castigator?"

Nox pauses for a bit. "Two damage," he says, correcting himself. "I knew that."

You chuckle and get back to your thoughts. You've seen Nox miss more than a few things before; maybe there's a gap or three that he might be overlooking right now.

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

You are at 5 life, with the following cards in play:

• Boreal Druid (with your Metamorphic Alteration attached, copying Nox's Corpulent Corpse)
• Wild Mongrel (with your Armor of Thorns attached)
• Marker Beetles
• Dream Prowler
• Verdant Eidolon
• Carnivorous Plant
• Phytotitan
• 4 Forest
• 2 Island

You have the following cards in your hand:

• Barrin's Unmaking
• Cytoshape

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

Nox is at 8 life and has no cards in his hand. He has the following cards in play:

• Culling Drone
• Blood Knight
• Tar Pit Warrior
• Ugin's Construct (with your Lignify attached)
• Goldnight Castigator (tapped, with Nox's Flayer Husk attached)
• Shimian Night Stalker
• Corpulent Corpse
• Dark Hatchling
• 4 Swamp (three tapped)
• 3 Mountain (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 - The Power of Three" by 11:59 P.M. EST on Monday, September 10, 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, Stephen Gross, Ryou Niji, Sean Patrick Keatley, Russell Jones, Hyman Rosen, Marco Majoor, Nicolas Berger, Chris Billard, John Carney, David Arnold, Greg Dreher, and Jeremy Regan.

"This week is another one where our strategy involves giving our opponent just a bit more value out of one of their cards than they're prepared to handle," Stephen Gross observes.

"Deadly Allure is not Lure," Chris Billard notes, "so we can only force one of Sandra's creatures to block our target creature. This still leaves her with enough blockers to handle all of our other attackers, so it will not be possible for us to win with damage. Instead, we will turn Sandra's Angelic Protector against her through the Fruit of the First Tree."

To be fair, the fact that you know the exact number of cards remaining in your opponent's library may have something to do with this insight. Nicolas Berger takes us through the steps involved:

This causes Sandra to draw twenty-two cards in one move. Because she has only twenty-one cards remaining, however, Sandra loses when she tries to draw her twenty-second card from an empty library.

"Some variation exists within this strategy," Addison Fox adds."Notably, we don't technically need to target Bellowing Aegisaur with Infernal Harvest, since 21 toughness is enough to kill Sarah as long as she draws a card on her turn. However, doing it all now lets us play around the Unabridged Cube, since Sarah will have half her deck in hand and six mana to cast any instants that might shuffle her graveyard into her library during her upkeep. (Even Unexpectedly Absent would do it, since we're Very Dead in the air.)"

"7/22 is roughly 1/pi," Russell Jones writes, "so you could say this situation is tantamount to having the tables inverted and getting a pie in the face. Maybe next time Sandra won't play the Bellowing Aegisaur, and can safely draw into an ill-fated Gaea's Blessing and play that to survive instead!"