Edit: Whoops - we accidentally left out a card from your side of the board! The missing card has now been added.

You sit up. This doesn't bode well at all - you're at a mere two life, and after a long stalemate, both you and your opponent are looking for something that can break the game wide open. Unfortunately, it looks like Leo has found something before you did.

"I've got nothing in response," you say. "Not that I can do anything without any cards in hand, of course."

"I'll create a Wolf token, then, and the Saddle attaches to it."

"Okay."

"I'll pay three," Leo says, tapping the last of his lands, "and equip the Saddle to my Chaos Imps. That makes it an 8/7."

You swallow carefully. "Yeah, that's right," you say.

"I'll attack with my Chaos Imps. Cathedral of War triggers for its Exalted ability, so the Imps are now 9/8."

"With trample," you point out.

"With trample," Leo says. "And flying. And the Saddle means that they can't be blocked by more than one creature."

You glance at your available blockers. You only have two creatures that can get in the way of a flying attacker at this point: One of them is a Beacon Hawk you can't pump high enough to save yourself, and the other is a Tangle Mantis that just happens to be the most recent recipient of your Gryff's Boon.

"I'll block your Imps with my Tangle Mantis," you say.

"It's just 4 toughness," Leo says.

"I know."

"Are you sacrificing your Benevolent Bodyguard to give it protection from Red?"

You think for a few seconds. "No," you say, "the Bodyguard won't change the fact that you'll assign four of the Imps' 9 damage to my Mantis, and the other five to me."

"So... good game?" Leo asks.

"Not quite," you say, shaking your head. "I'll sacrifice my Cystbearer to my Ravenous Baloth's ability and gain four life."

"Wait," Leo says, leaning forward to get a closer look at your Baloth. "You can do that?"

"The Baloth lets me sacrifice a Beast," you note. "And Cystbearer is a Beast."

Leo reads both of your cards, and then slumps back in his chair. "Well... I'll be darned," he says. "I'll be darned."

"So I'm at two life, I gain four life from Ravenous Baloth, and I take five trample damage from Chaos Imps," you say. "That puts me at one life."

"I didn't see that," Leo says.

"Yeah, the Unabridged Cube really springs these things on you."

"How do you do that?" Leo asks. "I mean, this is like my fifth time drafting this and I'm still not getting the hang of it."

You shrug. "Sometimes you see it, and sometimes you don't. You can't really predict every single interaction in a Cube that has one of each card ever printed - the only thing you can do is get lucky enough to notice a good one every now and then."

"I'll keep that in mind," Leo says. "Okay, so you're at one life."

"Yeah," you say, dropping the Mantis and the Gryff's Boon into your graveyard. "I don't think I can last much longer against a giant trampling flyer, though."

"You never know what you might draw."

"Yeah, like I'll pull something that can win me the game right here," you say. It's not that you've done this before, of course, but there's no sense believing that you can topdeck yourself out of every sticky situation.

You untap and draw a Thespian's Stage - one of the cards that you sideboarded for this game after seeing the range of nonbasic lands your opponent is playing. You're not sure how it can help you at the moment, though.

"Did you get something good?" Leo asks.

You thumb the card in your hand. "I don't know just yet," you say. "Let's see."

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

You are at 1 life, with the following cards in play:

• Benevolent Bodyguard (with your Nature's Kiss attached)
• Beacon Hawk
• Kwende, Pride of Femeref (with your Sharpened Pitchfork attached)
• Ravenous Baloth
• Embodiment of Insight (with your Sixth Sense attached)
• 4 Forests
• 3 Plains

You have the following card in your hand:

• Thespian's Stage

You have not yet played a land this turn. You still have a substantial number of cards remaining in your library, but you know neither the identities nor the order of those cards.

You have the following cards in your graveyard, in order:

• Gryff's Boon (topmost card)
• Tangle Mantis
• Cystbearer
• Soul Shepherd (bottommost card)

Leo is at 4 life and has no cards in his hand. He has the following cards in play:

• Weaver of Lightning
• Kavu Aggressor
• Locust Swarm
• Giant Spider
• Pine Walker
• Chaos Imps (tapped, with a +1/+1 counter and Leo's Wolfrider's Saddle attached)
• a 2/2 Wolf token (from Wolfrider's Saddle)
• 2 Mountains (both tapped)
• 3 Forests (all tapped)
• Barbarian Ring (tapped)
• Cathedral of War (tapped)

Leo has the following cards in his graveyard:

• Searing Blood
• Thornweald Archer
• Vithian Renegades
• Chandra's Fury
• Kalonian Tusker
• Chain Lightning

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 - Merely Players" by 11:59 P.M. EST on Monday, December 16, 2019. 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 Sean Patrick Keatley, Hyman Rosen, Greg Dreher, Russell Jones, Max Bernstein, Addison Fox, Jacob Butcher, and David Arnold. A partial solution was also received from Stephen Shin.

"As is frequently the case," Addison Fox writes, "if there's a weird non-card spat out by the Unabridged Cube, somehow it will end up winning us the game through a bizarre set of circumstances. In this case, we need to operate a small holiday gift exchange in order to turn it on."

"You obviously need to tap the Corrupted Key to win," Greg Dreher notes, "and since you can only tap your opponent's permanents, that makes the path to victory clear. Convoluted, but clear."

"The key to this," Max Bernstein adds, "is that Gadwick's ability lets you tap an opponent's permanent, so we just need to give Kei the Key, tap it, and then take it back to get the win! Kei does have some lifelink creatures, though, which makes this a little trickier than it looks."

Daring Thief is probably your most active card for this situation, seeing that it's able to use the Corrupted Key to enable an exchange, then follow that up by stealing the Key right back. However, this puzzle is also a matter of setting up the right targets for the right effects, and one of the big questions is exactly what you exchange the Key for. Russell Jones writes:

"This was a particularly fiendish puzzle!" Jacob Butcher notes. "I figured out that I wanted to and how to swap Corrupted Key with an artifact of Kei's pretty quickly. But it took me forever to notice that Byway Courier could provide Kei with an artifact to swap! And then it took me thrice forever to realize that deathtouch allowed enhanced trample damage!"