Locations
Someone has started putting up decorations for next week's Guilds of Ravnica prerelease tournament, but it's obvious they haven't finished yet: You can see the symbols for the Dimir, Boros, Izzet and Selesnya guilds on the walls, but the Golgari one seems to be missing. You assume that it's because the latter symbol is taking them more time to trace and cut, due to its slight complexity.
Considering that your mind has been wandering so much, it's safe to say that you're bored with this game. You and your opponent, Sibyl, have been stalemated for several turns now: With you at a scant three life and Sibyl not much better off, you've both been a lot more conservative with your recent plays.
Part of the reason for your stalemate is the fact that you're each waiting for the other one to blink. Sibyl has webbed up your Forlorn Pseudamma - the only creature you have that can get past her blockers - and has a better defensive line overall. You, on the other hand, set her Talas Air Ship on Guard Duty, and have been holding the line with some ready removal: a Seal of Doom and a Fume Spitter.
"Not many preview cards today," Sibyl remarks.
"Yeah," you say. "The Cube's temperamental."
Sibyl looks at you. "The Cube? You mean the Unabridged Cube? The one with one of each card ever printed?"
"It's like a living thing sometimes. The preview cards usually come up during spoiler season, but they ramp down as we get closer to the prerelease."
"That explains why I didn't get anything from Guilds of Ravnica today," Sibyl says, peeling her next card off the top of her library.
"We'll see it next weekend," you say.
Sibyl's expression suddenly changes. "I did get something from the original Ravnica block, though."
That sounds like trouble. "I take it that you're casting it now," you say.
"Simic Sky Swallower," Sibyl announces, dropping the 6/6 flying, trampling shrouded monster onto the table. "I'll tap everything except for one of my Forests to cast it."
"Err... okay," you say, glancing at your notepad. So much for your defense, really - two small flyers won't do much against a Simic Sky Swallower, and your two pieces of removal might as well be coasters against its shroud ability.
"Your turn," Sibyl says, and you immediately move to draw a card. It's a Qilin's Blessing, which seems decent for you: Between the combat trick, your Dauntless Aven, and your Tethered Griffin, you've got enough to take down the Sky Swallower when it attacks. But that assumes that Sibyl doesn't draw anything good on her turn.
Then again, you do have another option, which is to find a way to take Sibyl down this turn. She's only at five life, which puts her within striking distance. But how do you expect to get through for the win?
It is the start of your first main phase. Defeat Sibyl before the beginning of her next combat phase.
You are at 3 life, with the following cards in play:
- Fume Spitter
- Tethered Griffin
- Dauntless Aven
- Forlorn Pseudamma (with Sibyl's Arachnus Web attached)
- Ledev Guardian
- Ghost Council of Orzhova
- No Rest for the Wicked
- Seal of Doom
- 4 Plains
- 4 Swamp
You have the following card in your hand:
You have not yet played a land this turn. You know neither the identities nor the order of the cards remaining in your library.
Sibyl is at 5 life and has no cards in her hand. She has the following cards in play:
- Aquamoeba (with Sibyl's Carapace attached)
- Giant Tortoise
- Villagers of Estwald
- Carven Caryatid
- Talas Air Ship (with your Guard Duty attached)
- Grazing Whiptail
- Treespring Lorian
- Simic Sky Swallower
- 5 Forest (four tapped)
- 3 Island (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 Restless Ones" by 11:59 P.M. EST on Monday, October 1, 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, Russell Jones, Sean Patrick Keatley, Ryou Niji, Eli Meyer, Trevor Holness. Greg Dreher, Ian Gegenheimer, Jeremy Regan, Michael Reluzco, Hyman Rosen, Rick Argiro, Matt Bocek, Paul Gersberg, Jordan Crittenden, Marco Majoor, Paul Simpson, Robert Smith, Chris Billard, David Foodym, David Arnold, and Max Bernstein.
"At first glance," Paul Simpson writes, "this board state seems complicated. But I do see a Scuttling Doom Engine, a means to kill it (Big Game Hunter) and a means to clone it (Mirage Mirror). We even have a defender with an activated ability that just might close out the game (Wall of Limbs), so can we...?"
As it turns out, yes: The easiest approach involves arming (sorry) your Wall of Limbs with enough +1/+1 counters to get your opponent's life total within its grasp. The only catch is that you'll need a lot of mana to activate the Wall, but Eli Meyer writes:
- Tap Loam Dryad and Exiled Boggart for mana. Tap two lands for mana. Seven lands remain untapped. You have 3 mana floating.
- Activate Mirage Mirror and have it become a copy of Plaguemaw Beast. (1 mana floating.)
- Activate Plaguemaw Beast #1 sacrificing itself. Trigger the Sadistic Glee on Wall of Limbs (two +1/+1 counters). Proliferate onto Spike Feeder (three +1/+1 counters) and Wall of Limbs (three +1/+1 counters).
- Activate Plaguemaw Beast #2, sacrificing Exiled Boggart. Discard and cast Big Game Hunter (zero mana floating) to kill the Plaguemaw Beast. Trigger the Sadistic Glee on Wall of Limbs twice (five +1/+1 counters). Proliferate onto Spike Feeder (four +1/+1 counters) and Wall of Limbs (six +1/+1 counters).
- Activate Spike Feeder four times, triggering Wall of Limbs four times (ten +1/+1 counters). This kills Feeder and triggers Sadistic Glee once more (eleven +1/+1 counters).
- Use the seven remaining lands to activate Wall of Limbs and kill the opponent.
There are some minor variations to this approach: You can gain some life from the Spike Feeder, then have Big Game Hunter destroy Nikola's Scuttling Doom Engine instead of your second Plaguemaw Beast, for example. One thing you can do for style points is to activate Wall of Limbs during Nikola's upkeep, after your Sun Droplet puts a twelfth +1/+1 counter on it.
Another approach still uses Wall of Limbs for the kill, but points out that you can have Scuttling Doom Engine do most of the heavy lifting. Chris Billard writes:
- Activate Mirage Mirror with
and copy Nikola's Scuttling Doom Engine. - Activate Plaguemaw Beast, sacrificing our Scuttling Doom Engine. Our Scuttling Doom Engine dies and Nikola takes 6 points of damage. Sadistic Glee gives Wall of Limbs a +1/+1 counter.
- Plaguemaw Beast's ability resolves. Proliferate a +1/+1 counter onto both Spike Feeder and Wall of Limbs.
- Remove a +1/+1 counter from Spike Feeder to gain 2 life; this puts a +1/+1 counter on Wall of Limbs. Repeat this one more time so that Wall of Limbs will have five +1/+1 counters.
- Sacrifice Wall of Limbs with
to have Nikola lose their remaining 4 points of life (and then some).
The curious bit about this solution is that it works even if you don't have Sadistic Glee on the table. Addison Fox further notes that you can also use this approach to attack with the Scuttling Doom Engine:
- Pay to make Mirage Mirror a copy of Scuttling Doom Engine, leaving us 7 mana to activate Wall of Limbs.
- Attack with Scuttles (and Spike Feeder, for that matter). Nikola has three options: Because they can only block with creatures with power 3 or above, they can either take 6 damage, chump with either Voracious Reader or Spireside Infiltrator, or double-block with both and trade off.
- If they take 6 damage, we can simply sacrifice the Doom Engine to Plaguemaw Beast to proliferate and deal an additional 6 damage. This is a line Nikola is surely keen on avoiding, so we can assume they don't do that.
- If they double-block, they take 6 damage when Scuttles dies. But with three creatures dying in combat,Wall of Limbs gets three +1/+1 counters from Sadistic Glee, which is enough to be sacrificed for the final 4 life.
- That leaves chump-blocking. Either the Infiltrator or the Reader get thrown under a bus, putting a +1/+1 counter on the Wall of Limbs. In this case, tap Plaguemaw Beast to sacrifice Scuttling Doom Engine to proliferate. This puts a third +1/+1 counter on the wall from Sadistic Glee, and you proliferate a fourth +1/+1 counter... exactly enough for a lethal activation.
Because you have one more mana available from the Loam Dryad's ability, you could also take the alternative option of sacrificing Exiled Boggart to Plaguemaw Beast and having Big Game Hunter destroy your Scuttling Doom Engine.
The oddest solution, though, ignores Wall of Limbs completely. This instead uses Firemind's Research as its kill condition, as Ryou Niji writes:
- In response to that, pay to activate the ability of Mirage Mirror targeting Sun Droplet.
- In response to that, pay to activate the ability of Mirage Mirror targeting Loam Dryad. Let this one resolve.
- Tap Mirage Mirror (now copying Loam Dryad) and Exiled Boggart to float
. - Let the second Mirage Mirror activation resolve. Mirage Mirror becomes a copy of Sun Droplet.
- Remove a +1/+1 counter from Spike Feeder to gain 2 life. We are now at 8 life.
- Tap Plaguemaw Beast and sacrifice Exiled Boggart to activate its proliferate ability.
- When Exiled Boggart dies, discard Big Game Hunter.
- Pay to cast Big Game Hunter with madness, destroying Scuttling Doom Engine with its ETB ability.
- When Scuttling Doom Engine dies, it deals 6 damage to us. We are now at 2 life.
- Mirage Mirror (copying Sun Droplet) triggers and gets six charge counters. (The real Sun Droplet also gets counters, but we don't care about that.)
- Plaguemaw Beast's proliferate activation finally resolves. Put an extra counter on everything we control with any counters. In particular, Mirage Mirror now has seven charge counters and Spike Feeder now has two +1/+1 counters. Don't put an extra charge counter on the real Firemind's Research.
- Tap the real Loam Dryad and Spike Feeder to float a second Red mana.
- In response to the Lust for War trigger, remove both +1/+1 counters from Spike Feeder to gain 4 life. We are now at 6 life.
- The Lust for War trigger deals 3 damage to us (down to 3 life), which puts three charge counters on Mirage Mirror. It now has ten charge counters.
- Finally, let the first Mirage Mirror activation resolve. Mirage Mirror becomes a copy of Firemind's Research.
- Tap our lands for . Combined with the we floated earlier, we can now activate the second ability of Firemind's Research twice, dealing a total of 10 damage to the opponent.
Pay to activate the ability of Mirage Mirror targeting Firemind's Research.
"As an aside," David Foodym remarks, "I have to really question Nicola's choice to put Lust for War on a Spike Feeder, of all things. It can sacrifice itself at any time to get rid of its curse! If you're getting your big attackers tapped down, why not enrage the Rathi Trapper instead? It still guarantees the 3 damage per turn, but frees up your best creature in the process. If getting the card draw off Psychic Membrane was the goal, it still doesn't matter that much because Loam Dryad lets us tap anything we want."
