Your card pool isn’t exactly the best one possible. In fact, in this particular tournament, nobody’s is — the Unabridged Cube appears to be temperamental today. Seeing as it’s a collection of one of each card ever printed, however, you figure that it’s entitled to its bad days.

You did encounter one interesting wrinkle in your forty cards, however, and Tommy’s pointing at it right now. “What does that do again?” he asks.

You pick up the Conqueror’s Flail attached to your Teardrop Kami. “It gives +1/+1 for each color among my permanents,” you say, “and as long as it’s attached to something, you can’t cast spells on my turn.”

“So it’s a 4/4 right now?”

You glance at your side of the table, and remember the Nightscape Familiar you’ve stolen from Tommy. “Yes,” you tell him,“it’s a 4/4.”

“I’ll pay 3 mana to attach a Krovikan Fetish to my Fire Juggler, and then I’ll attack with both that and my Sabertooth Outrider.”

“The Outrider’s what now?”

“With Feast of the Unicorn, it’s an 8/4 with trample.”

“And first strike?” you ask.

“And first strike, thanks.”

“And the Fire Juggler’s a 3/3,” you say, “not counting the Demonspine Whip.”

“Right.”

“I’ll throw my Pillarfield Ox in front of your Sabertooth Outrider. And my Sanctuary Cat blocks your Fire Juggler.”

"My Fire Juggler triggers, then,” Tommy says, revealing the top card of his library. “Can your clash beat an Explosive Impact?”

“I’ve only got a Plains, so that’ll kill the Cat,” you shrug.

“Right. You’ll take four trample damage and go to five life . . . unless you’re sacrificing that Shield Mate of yours.”

You shake your head. “I’ll save it,” you say. “Before the end of your turn, I’ll cast Lat-Nam's Legacy and shuffle my Isl . . .  my card back into my library.”

“Okay. End my turn, draw my Explosive Impact at the beginning of your upkeep?”

You freeze. “Wait, what?”

“Krovikan Fetish,” Tommy points out. “It lets me draw a card at the start of the next upkeep.”

“Oh, so . . . ”

“Relax,” Tommy says. “You’ve still got that Conqueror’s Flail, remember? I can’t cast spells during your turn as long as it’s attached to something.”

You read the card again, then breathe a sigh of relief as you take your draws. Your draw from the Lat-Nam's Legacy gives you a Changeling Sentinel and a Pongify, while your normal draw gets you a Momentary Blink.

Without any counterspells in hand, you’ve obviously got a single turn left before Tommy blasts you into oblivion. But is there anything you can do at this point?

It is the start of your first main phase. Defeat Tommy before the beginning of his next upkeep.

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

• Shield Mate (with your Necropouncer attached)
• Teardrop Kami (with your Conqueror’s Flail attached)
• Nightscape Familiar (owned by Tommy, with your Threads of Disloyalty attached)
• Leonin Relic-Warder (exiling Tommy’s Arachnoid)
• Avacyn's Collar
• 4 plains
• 4 islands
• Calciform Pools (with five storage counters on it)

You have the following cards in your hand:

• Pongify (drawn via Lat-Nam's Legacy)
• Momentary Blink (drawn during your draw step this turn)
• Changeling Sentinel (drawn via Lat-Nam's Legacy)

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

Tommy is at 9life. He has the following cards in play:

• Goblin Digging Team
• Wall of Corpses
• Goblin Skycutter
• Fire Juggler (tapped, with Tommy’s Krovikan Fetish and Demonspine Whip attached)
• Moonglove Winnower
• Sabertooth Outrider (tapped, with Tommy’s Feast of the Unicorn attached)
• 4 swamps (one tapped)
• 5 mountains (two tapped)

Tommy has exactly one card in his hand:

• Explosive Impact

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 — Epic Flail” by 11:59 P.M. EST on Sunday, November6, 2016. 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 Russell Jones, Aaron Golas, Hyman Rosen, Subrata Sircar, Siang Koon Kwek, Dominic Chan, Alfred Hsie, Ryou Niji, Jeff Proksch, Matthew Harvey, and Michael Feldman.

“The key card to this solution is obvious,” Siang Koon Kwek writes. “Feeding Frenzy!”

“The most effective Zombie generator on our side is Noosegraf Mob, which gives us one Zombie for every spell we cast, and Maalfeld Twins, which leave us two zombies when it dies. So our mission is pretty clear: Play as many spells as possible and kill Maalfeld Twins ourselves.

“We also have to keep track of multiple items to give us the most advantage: Our creature count in our graveyard for Songs of the Damned, the order of the creatures in our graveyard for Corpse Dance, and most important of all, the number of Zombies we have. At our current board state, we can safely assume that Ola will kill one of our Zombie tokens with Dogged Hunter at some point, so we start our solution with a count of six Zombies instead of seven.”

There are more than a few solutions possible here, but all of them hinge on sacrificing the right cards at the right moments, as well as making the most of Corpse Dance. Russell Jones writes:

Note that you need to activate Gangrenous Zombies at some point: Noosegraf Mob gets +1/+1 from Cemetery Reaper, so unless you remove the Cemetery Reaper from play, the Mob won’t die from the loss of counters alone.

One variant of this solution involves activating Gangrenous Zombies, returning it to play with Corpse Dance, then activating it to trigger Nested Ghoul a second time — as well as dealing 1 more damage to the Hollowhenge Beast. This approach has its own twists, though, as Michael Feldman notes:

You're feeling exhausted, mentally and physically. Depressingly, Ola's tokens are geared to increase in abundance and yours are essentially nonexistent. You feel as though your chances are slipping away, as darkness falls across the land of your mind's eye — not to mention your actual eyes.

Finally, Hyman Rosen has a solution that doesn’t use Feeding Frenzy to kill Hollowhenge Beast. It takes advantage of the fact that you have Corpse Dance and a huge amount of mana available, and for style points, it secures the win during your upkeep phase. The only hitch it that it leaves you at 1 life:

“Seriously,” Alfred Hsie adds, “Jackson's deck has a huge flaw: No creature removal. This is the biggest strength of Black, and I usually keep two playsets of permanent removal whenever I play a Black deck. No Cruel Revival? Feast or Famine? Rathi Assassin? Skinthinner? Stronghold Assassin? Victim of Night? All Zombie-themed, all creature removal!”

“Let's move on from that Thriller of a situation,” Michael writes.“That Hollowhenge Beast put you in a Dangerous position so Bad it made you want to Scream. So you had to shut it down like a Smooth Criminal. But not everything is Black or White. There's plenty more to this game before you Beat It. Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough of your zombies, though!”