Unfortunately, any likelihood of her ending her call and getting back to your game dematerializes when she stands up and starts pacing around the room. “No,” she says into her phone. “No . . .  no . . .  say that again?”

“I guess we’ve got a few minutes,” you tell CJ.

“Cool,” CJ says. “So what do you think of the deck?”

You glance at the cards in front of you. “It’s . . .  um . . .  interesting.”

“I know, right?” CJ says, grinning. “It’s got eighteen different ghosts, a couple of slimes . . . ”

“Is that why you had this in here?” you ask, picking up the Corrupted Zendikon attached to your swamp.

“Yeah, and I threw in a Necroplasm and Necrotic Ooze too. It’s all part of the theme! There’s even a single copy of Athreos, God of Passage in there.”

“So why the Athreos?” you ask, but the answer snaps into your head at the same time CJ tells you.

“Because that way,” CJ says, “when someone asks you if you have a god, you say ‘Yes!’”

You roll your eyes and glance back at your opponent, hoping that she’s about to end her call and save you from CJ’s attempts at humor. Unfortunately, it still looks like she’s trying to argue, negotiate and explain things to her caller at the same time.

“Yes,” Janine stresses into her phone, “of course they're serious . . .  you do? You have? No kidding!”

“You think she’s going to come back anytime soon?” CJ asks.

“When you work in the private sector,” you say, “they expect results.”

Just before her phone rang, Janine cast an Emancipation Angel, bounced and recast her Cathedral Sanctifier, and bumped herself up to 6 life. This came as a surprise, because you were expecting her to bounce her Mist Raven and use it to remove your Skulking Ghost . . .  but perhaps she just wanted to get a more comfortable life total first. In any event, you’re facing down quite a few flyers now, and need to make a move as soon as possible.

Janine suddenly sits down and starts scribbling something on your scorepad. “Just gimme the address,” she says, signaling to you that she’s ending her turn. “Sure . . .  sure, they’ll be totally discreet . . . ”

You untap your permanents and draw a card. Surprisingly, it’s a Fell the Mighty — you show it to CJ and ask the obvious question: “Uh . . .  why?”

“Oh yeah,” CJ says. “Well, you see, there’s this scene in the movie where . . . ”

“Spare me the details,” you say, shaking your head. With everything that’s going on, you’re starting to think that you should just finish this game, go home, and see what’s on TV.

“Seriously,” CJ says, “I’m sure it’s a great deck. I mean, it’s got the theme and everything.”

“Yeah, well,” you say, “I’m ready to believe you. Let’s do this.”

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

You are at 7 life, with the following cards in play:

• Skulking Ghost
• Nikko-Onna
• Drogskol Shieldmate
• Crypt Ghast
• Kami of Empty Graves
• Ghost Council of Orzhova
• Ghost Tactician (with Janine’s Bonds of Faith attached)
• 3 Plains
• 6 Swamps (one with your Corrupted Zendikon attached)

You have the following cards in your hand:

• Outbreak
• Fell the Mighty

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.

Janine is at 6 life and has no cards in her hand. She has the following cards in play:

• Cathedral Sanctifier
• Fiend Hunter (exiling your Ghostly Sentinel)
• Village Bell-Ringer
• Elder Cathar
• Emancipation Angel
• Mist Raven (paired with Janine’s Spectral Gateguards)
• Spectral Gateguards (paired with Janine’s Mist Raven)
• two 1/1 Human tokens
• one 1/1 Spirit token
• 4 Plains (three tapped)
• 4 Islands (one tapped)
• 2 Tranquil Cove

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 — Don’t Cross the Streams” by 11:59 P.M. EST on Sunday, October 29, 2017. We’ll include the best ones in next week’s article along with the next puzzle!

Last Week’s Puzzle

“The first thing I noticed about this board,” Allen Smith writes, “is that we're nowhere close to dealing 15 damage via combat. We have a total of 11 power, and while Gearseeker Serpent has an easy way to get through all the blockers, neither of our other two creatures with power can get through, since they're too big for Pathmaker Initiate’s ability. Sure, we can make Shielded Aether Thief unblockable, but since we have no way to boost its power, that doesn't seem very helpful.”

“Dealing lethal damage through a stalled board generally asks us to do some math,” Addison Fox clarifies. “In this case, the equation looks like ‘2 damage times a number of sacrificed artifacts, plus an amount of unblockable damage’. So how many artifacts can we sacrifice, and how many attackers can we make unblockable? Surprisingly, the answer to both of these questions is ‘three’, and that makes the equation work out to 15 damage, coincidentally the amount of life Vish has remaining.”

“In the end,” Matthew Harvey notes, “I realized we need to use Cooperate to copy Dramatic Reversal, so we could turn everything sideways multiple times. But how do we get the Cooperate into our graveyard? We can't let it target our Depths of Desire, as then we are just dead to Vish's Lightning-Rig Crew. So it needs to target something that only costs 2 or less. That leaves Dramatic Reversal . . .  or a re-cast Shielded Aether Thief. That’s perfect for us:

A lot of solutions seem to have been stymied by the second half of the sequence, coming up one mana short during your turn. It turns out that this is a matter of sequencing: “To get the eleven mana we need on our turn,” Ryou Niji writes, “we have to sacrifice Hierophant's Chalice after the second Dramatic Reversal, which means that the last thing that taps Embraal Gear-Smasher is its own ability. The solution, then, is to attack with your creatures first!”

“Things looked tough,” Greg Dreher remarks, “with a huge wall of creatures and comfortable life total for Vish. But we turned this one around 360 degrees.”