For starters, Roger has scored a first-pick Hostage Taker in your Ixalan release draft, and he’s using it in a nice deck. That normally isn’t too bad by itself, but Roger’s deck also has a number of nasty interactions with that Hostage Taker, which is why two of your best creatures are on his side of the table right now.

“Have you decided on your blocks?” Roger asks.

“No,” you say, trying to keep your thoughts straight. “What are you attacking with, again?”

“Just my Storm Sculptor, as well as the Raging Swordtooth and Ancient Brontodon I stole from you.”

“Great,” you sigh. “Just great.”

Still, all is not lost. You still have a few sizeable creatures on your side of the table, and if you can get rid of Roger’s Dinosaurs, you have a decent chance at staging a comeback this game. That, and Roger hasn’t drawn any of his flyers yet, so it’s not as though he has any further offensive capabilities available.

“Okay,” you say. “First of all, I can’t block your Storm Sculptor, so I’m definitely taking three damage from it.”

“Sure,” Roger says, smiling.

“I’ll block the Brontodon with my Ripjaw Raptor — the one with the Cobbled Wings on it — and my Grazing Whiptail. My Whiptail’s a 5/5 with the Dowsing Dagger attached, so that makes a total of 9 power facing your Brontodon.”

“Sure,” Roger says, still smiling.

“Sure,” Roger says. “Skulduggery, targeting your Horncrest and the Brontodon?”

You stare at the table for a while before it hits you. Then you say something so sulfurous that every single person in the store turns to stare at your table.

“Wow,” Roger says, completely taken aback. “I think I need to wash my ears after hearing that.”

“How many copies of Skulduggery do you even have in that deck?!”

“Three, I think,” Roger says. “I always thought it was a pretty good effect. Take one trample damage from the Swordtooth?”

You desperately count your mana, hoping to have enough for your Encampment Keeper’s ability, but you’re unfortunately one mana short. You drop your Horncrest, Whiptail, and Raptor into your graveyard, then draw a card from the Raptor’s effect. A Storm Fleet Pyromancer is not what you wanted to see, but at least it’s another body that can block.

Then Roger taps five lands and casts an Air Elemental, which sends you reeling. The last thing you need is a flyer on his side of the table, now that you no longer have your Grazing Whiptail!

“Must be nice,” you mutter.

“Just lucky,” Roger says. “I’ll cast the last card in my hand, a Seekers' Squire.”

“Sure.”

“It explores,” Roger adds. He reveals the top card of his library — a One With the Wind, which causes you to roll your eyes — and chooses to keep it on top. “That’s it for my turn,” he says.

You untap and draw a Rallying Roar, which sets off a few more seconds of muffled cursing from you. There’s something to be said for cards that appear in your hand the turn after you really need them, and whatever it is probably isn’t very nice.

“Cheer up,” Roger says. “This is still our first game. You’ll have two more chances to get back up.”

Somehow, two more games of trying to play around Hostage Taker doesn’t appeal to you. And to be fair, you’ve been in far worse situations before . . .  but do you stand a chance of stealing this game after all you’ve just been through?

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

You are at 6 life, with the following cards in play:

• Encampment Keeper (with a +1/+1 counter on it)
• Drover of the Mighty
• Wildgrowth Walker
• Blossom Dryad
• Blossom Dryad
• Cobbled Wings
• Dowsing Dagger
• Mountain
• 5 Forests (one with your New Horizons attached)
• 3 Plains

You have the following cards in your hand:

• Rile
• Rallying Roar (drawn during your draw step this turn)
• Storm Fleet Pyromancer

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.

Roger is at 7 life and has no cards in his hand. He has the following cards in play:

• Seekers' Squire (with a +1/+1 counter on it)
• Hostage Taker (with Roger’s Pirate’s Cutlass attached)
• Headwater Sentries
• Storm Sculptor (tapped)
• Air Elemental
• Raging Swordtooth (tapped)
• Ancient Brontodon (tapped)
• 7 Islands (six tapped)
• 3 Swamps (two tapped)

The top card of Roger’s library is a One With the Wind.

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 Plot Thickens” by 11:59 P.M. EST on Sunday, October 8, 2017. We’ll include the best ones in next week’s article along with the next puzzle!

Last Week’s Puzzle

“We're tantalizingly close to being able to kill Octavia just with combat,” Allen Smith writes.“Skulduggery can kill her Duskborne Skymarcher, and Territorial Hammerskull can tap down another flying blocker, but we have no way to get rid of the third flying blocker. This also leaves her with enough creatures that just going wide isn't going to work, either.”

“Luckily,” Addison Fox writes, “we have a source of noncombat damage in Raiders' Wake, if we can somehow 1) get two cards into her hand, and 2) make her discard the second one. Thankfully, we have flooded out a fair bit and somehow didn't find a window to deploy our many tricks, so we have eleven mana. That’s enough to cast every spell in our hand and still equip the Cutlass to something.”

“Targeting one of Octavia’s creatures with Verdant Rebirth — then killing it — will get one card into her hand,” Ian McCaulley adds.“For the other, Vanquish the Weak will return to Octavia's hand if Kitesail Freebooter leaves the battlefield. Unfortunately, Vanquish the Weak is an instant, and thanks to the Treasure token, Octavia has the mana to cast it in order to avoid discarding it, such as in response to Duress.

“To prevent her from casting Vanquish the Weak, we must make sure there are no legal targets for it (i.e. no creatures with power 3 or less on the battlefield) before it returns to her hand. It's a close thing, but thanks to her Bellowing Aegisaur, you can just manage it.”

This solution needs some bookkeeping, and Hyman Rosen’s solution tracks this as follows:

“Oddly enough,” Norman Dean muses, “our path to victory requires us to make our opponent's creatures as big as possible — especially the unblockable one.”

This solution has one variant: You can choose to give the Skulduggery bonus to your Grazing Whiptail (making it a 4/5 creature), then use Territorial Hammerskull to tap the Shining Aerosaur. This forces Octavia’s 2/4 Skyblade of the Legion to block your 3/3 Kitesail Freebooter, with more or less the same outcome.

That said, you can also take a simpler alternative. As Micah Dilts writes:

“In most places,” David Arnold notes, “archers fire on their enemies from afar. But in Atzoca, the archers apparently start bar fights with pirates.”