“That brings me down to five life,” you say. “What sort of deck did you say yours was again?”

“It’s something I put together from Jackson’s collection,” Ola says. “That’s ‘cause he has a lot of spare cards.”

This doesn’t surprise you. You’re playing a deck borrowed from Jackson yourself — a “Thriller Night” Zombie deck that leans more toward theme than playability. The problem is that, as a Mono-Black deck, it doesn’t have a lot in the way of enchantment removal.

Under the moonlight, you see a sight that almost stops your heart. You can barely see Ola’s Hollowhenge Beast under the mountain of auras attached to it — all of which combine to make it a 15/17 creature with vigilance, lifelink, trample, reach, and the ability to create a Saproling token every turn.

Needless to say, the monstrous creature is the reason why your life total isn’t as high as you want it to be. It’s also why Ola’s life total is off the wall right now; you can feel this game slipping away from you by the second.

You try to scream, but terror takes the sound before you make it. You shouldn’t be cursing in the first place, you think — after all, you didn’t make this stupid deck.

Ola gives you a strange look. “You forgot about the Pillar Tombs?” she asks. “I sacrificed a Saproling to it last turn!”

You start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes. The World Enchantment effectively puts you in a bad situation: Even if you’re able to hold off Ola’s attacks somehow, you’re still going to be losing a creature each turn!

You struggle to find the right words. “This . . .  is not a good deck,” you say.

“It never was,” Ola admits. “Jackson just puts whatever catches his attention in there.”

You're paralyzed. You look at the cards you have in your hand, then at the creatures you have in play. You do have a lot of zombies on the table. But when you consider how much toughness you have to scramble together just to stay alive on Ola’s next attack . . . 

“Really,” you say. “Why?”

“'Cause this is Thriller,” Ola shrugs.“Thriller Night.”

Well, no one's gonna save you from the Beast about to strike, so perhaps it’s time you got to work. First, you need to decide what dies to the Pillar Tombs. Then you need to figure out how to get past Ola’s blockers, and . . .  wait . . . 

“You’re at thirty-nine life, right?”

“I’ve been hitting you with a lifelinked creature for a few turns now,” Ola says. “It’s a good thing you had that Tendrils of Corruption a while ago, or otherwise you’d never have gotten this far.”

You know. It's Thriller —Thriller Night, probably one of the strangest decks you’re ever seen. With Ola at thirty-nine life, however, you’re not going to see a win anytime soon.

But perhaps there’s something you can do about that stuff-of-nightmares Hollowhenge Beast of hers. Getting it to stop hitting you would be nice, but you need to figure out how.

You're fighting for your life inside a killer Thriller tonight. So what’s next?

It is the beginning of your upkeep phase. You’ve just put Pillar Tombs of Aku’s ability on the stack, with Verdant Embrace’s triggered ability on top of it. You may still cast spells or activate abilities in response (although you’ll still need to decide what to do about these abilities when they resolve).Remove Ola’s Hollowhenge Beast from the battlefield before the start of her next turn.

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

• Sewer Shambler
• Gangrenous Zombies
• Cemetery Reaper
• Nested Ghoul
• Maalfeld Twins
• Noosegraf Mob (with three +1/+1 counters on it)
• a 2/2 Zombie token
• Quagmire
• Pillar Tombs of Aku
• 12 swamps
• Cabal Coffers

You have the following cards in your hand:

• Songs of the Damned
• Feeding Frenzy
• Corpse Dance

You do not know the identities of the next cards on top of your library.

You have the following creature cards in your graveyard:

• Fleshbag Marauder (topmost card)
• Viscera Dragger
• Risen Executioner (bottommost card)

Ola is at 39 life, and has no cards in her hand. She has the following cards in play:

• Dogged Hunter (with Ola’s Spider Umbra attached)
• Heliod's Pilgrim
• Citanul Woodreaders
• Farbog Explorer
• Penumbra Spider
• Hollowhenge Beast (with Ola’s Dragon Fangs, Glaring Aegis, Daybreak Coronet, Leafcrown Dryad and Verdant Embrace attached)
• a 1/1 Saproling token
• Ghostly Prison
• 6 forests
• 6 plains

Ola currently has no creature cards in her graveyard.

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 — Thriller Night” by 11:59 P.M. EST on Sunday, October30, 2016. We’ll include the best ones in next week’s article along with the next puzzle!

Last Week’s Puzzle

“This puzzle stumped me harder than a Treefolk cut down with a Bone Saw,” Dominic Chan writes.“Attacking into eleven 1/1s that deal and take no damage was not an option. It dawned on me we need to take advantage of Jackson's Pandemonium, but with which creature?”

“Our Allosaurus Rider was by far our largest creature,” Dominic continues,“but I first thought it was impossible to kill it, return it and recast for its alternative cost. Hard-casting it was too inefficient since it used seven of our available mana, and since we’d also need to cast Restock, this leaves a measly 3 mana to kill our Rider and deal another 3 damage to Jackson.”

Jeff Proksch also observes that a lot of things point us toward a noncombat solution: “It’s apparent that we cannot defeat Jackson through combat (unless by some miracle he declares no blockers) because of the sheer number of creatures he has, Statecraft being in play, and our creatures lacking evasion (with the exception of Nether Traitor). We also lack any enchantment removal to destroy Delusions of Mediocrity and cause Jackson to instantly lose 10 life.”

Further, there’s the point that Jackson isn’t actually at 15 life: “We also cannot lose sight of the fact that Jackson has an untapped High Market,” Jeff adds, “which he can use to gain one life. We must therefore consider Jackson's life total to be effectively 16.”

“We need to turn to two final avenues for attacking Jackson's life total: Extort and Pandemonium,” Aaron Golas notes.“And pandemonium it shall be, as you send your creatures into a free-for-all amongst themselves:

Some minor variants to this solution exist, but the general sequencing is important:

One interesting point to the solution is that you shouldn’t cast Setessan Tactics on your Phantom Nantuko. Setessan Tactics gives creatures +1/+1 in addition to the “fight” ability; when cast on the Nantuko, this means that the Nantuko can lose all its counters and remain a 1/1 creature while preventing all further damage to itself until end of turn!

Russell Jones points out that Statecraft and Phantom Nantuko use similar wording — they modify damage by preventing it. Russell therefore implies that you can try running the Nantuko into Jackson’s blockers, as follows:

If Phantom Nantuko goes unblocked, or faces only a single blocker that gets sacrificed to High Market before damage:

“This week's puzzle was ridiculous in a good way,” Ryou Niji writes.“We are ridiculously short on green cards to pitch, and the Phantom Nantuko is ridiculously large. It seems almost out of the question to kill Phantom Nantuko the hard way, one counter at a time, but that turns out to be the way this works.”