You slap at his hand. "Mind your manners," you hiss.

"It's all right," Miranda says, looking up. "Everyone's been asking to see it all day. You can go ahead."

CJ slides over her Leyline Tyrant for a better look. "That's a 4/4 flyer for four," he says. "And it's got Omnath's ability. That looks pretty good to me."

"Not to mention the fact that it goes boom when it dies," Miranda adds, glancing at you. "Are you done?"

"Just a second," you say. "I'll cast an Intrepid Hero before I end my turn."

"Are you sure you don't want to kill my Tyrant before I untap?"

You glance at your Aerie Ouphes and think about it for a while. "No," you finally say. "I'll save the Ouphes for now. I'll need to consider which of your flyers really needs the removal."

"As you wish," Miranda says. "I'll bank one Red mana with the Tyrant on your end step."

CJ leans back in his chair. "We should get used to that," he notes. "That thing's going to show up in Standard."

"It's a good thing it decided to show up here first, then. With the Unabridged Cube, I mean."

"Let me guess," Miranda says, reaching for the top card of her deck. "It's called 'unabridged' because it contains every single card in the game."

"Close enough," you admit. "It's got one of each card ever printed. Sometimes you can even find unreleased cards in the piles, but they only show up whenever we do Limited events. That's why the store holds a lot of drafts with it."

"Oooooh!" Miranda says.

"Yeah, that would be my reaction to getting a preview card too," CJ notes.

"No," Miranda says, "I meant this. Entreat the Angels!"

You raise an eyebrow. "Okay, that's pretty bad."

"Not for me! I'll tap all six of my lands for it, plus the Red mana from last turn. So that's... six Angel tokens?"

You glance at the swarm of 4/4 flyers that Miranda has suddenly dumped onto the table. "Okay," you say, "now my Aerie Ouphes look obsolete."

"You've still got that Intrepid Hero, though," CJ points out.

"Thanks. That makes me feel a whole lot better."

"I guess I'm just attacking with my Leyline Tyrant," Miranda says. "Are you blocking with those Court Archers of yours?"

You shake your head. "I think I'm going to be awash in attacking flyers soon enough. I'll take the four damage and go down to eight. What's your life total again?"

"Nine."

You nod. "At least that still makes us somewhat even," you muse.

"Not really," CJ adds. "I mean, she just needs to get two of those Angels past your blockers next turn, and then..."

"Like I said, that makes me feel a whole lot better."

"It is your turn now, though," Miranda says. "Maybe you'll draw something."

You untap your permanents and reach for the top card of your deck. For that matter, you do draw something, but it's yet another land - a Game Trail, to be exact. You tuck it next to the Boros Fury-Shield in your hand.

"Okay," you say, "I think I need to take the gloves off now."

"You're not wearing gloves," CJ says.

"It's a figure of speech. You're tapped out, right?"

"Right," Miranda says.

"And you have, uh, eleven untapped creatures to my seven, right?"

"Right."

"Okay," you say, tugging at your face mask. "This might be a little more difficult than I thought."

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

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

• Caustic Caterpillar
• Weathered Wayfarer
• Llanowar Scout
• Intrepid Hero
• Court Archers (with your Rancor attached)
• Aerie Ouphes
• Vigorspore Wurm
• 4 Forests
• 3 Plains

You have the following cards in your hand:

• Boros Fury-Shield
• Game Trail

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

Miranda is at 9 life and has no cards in her hand. She has the following cards in play:

• Fire Shrine Keeper
• Angelic Wall
• Lava Runner
• Leyline Tyrant (tapped)
• Wall of Swords
• Anarchist
• 6 4/4 Angel tokens (created by Entreat the Angels)
• 3 Mountains (all tapped)
• 3 Plains (all tapped)

If you've got a solution in mind, don't put it in the comments! Help keep this puzzle a mystery to other readers!

Instead, if you think you've got a great solution, you can send your solution to puzzles@gatheringmagic.com with the subject line "Puzzle - Too Many Angels" by 11:59 P.M. EST on Monday, September 14, 2020. 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 Hyman Rosen, Sean Patrick Keatley, Jacob Butcher, Michael Feldman, and David Arnold.

This puzzle puts you in a different spot, because you can't win on the current board. Your only hope is to survive until your opponent's next upkeep, at which point their Dark Confidant (if it's still around at that point) might give you some shot at victory. That may or may not happen, of course, but you first need to get there in order to see how it goes.

The problem is that you're at a single point of life, and there are a lot of cards that are just itching to make you lose it:

• The Pirate token forces all of your creatures to attack, and anything on your side that dies will cause Massacre Wurm to trigger.
• If you do attack and manage to survive, then Ruin Raider stands a fair chance of killing you at the beginning of your end step.
• If you somehow manage to keep from attacking, then Erg Raiders will kill you at the beginning of your end step.

There's also a corner case where your opponent's Puppeteer Clique might somehow put your Skymarch Bloodletter into play and drain you for one life, but this is unlikely to happen if you play your cards right.

This means that the easiest way to meet your objective is to get rid of the above three concerns without causing any of your creatures to die (or at least not prematurely, at any rate). "And we might as well maximize our chances of winning by making sure Dark Confidant survives to Ishamel's next upkeep," David Arnold adds:

This approach has some variants: One possibility involves casting Alley Evasion from your graveyard instead of Vile Rebirth, which you can then use on Ruin Raider instead of the Sentinel's Eyes / Blightcaster combination. The only catch with this solution, really, is the fact that you leave your opponent at six life, reducing the chances of a Dark Confidant win on your opponent's upkeep.

An alternative solution does exist that doesn't involve your opponent gaining life, although this involves a more complicated sequence. Michael Feldman elaborates:

"The funny thing about this path," Michael notes, "is that the full -5/-5 of Waste Away is, well, wasted. It's really tempting to go after a creature with 5 toughness. So maybe, in this tale, it isn't the whale that might tempt a tragically futile pursuit, but a turtle."