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Striking Distance

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After having your fill of Shadows over Innistrad, you’re back to drafting your local game store’s Unabridged Cube, a collection of one of each card ever printed. You pulled together a rather middling deck in your initial foray, and unfortunately for you, you’re now facing the best deck from your table.

Thorn Elemental
Rain is playing a very greedy deck—a base-green, five-color affair with more than a few rares and nonbasic lands. She destroyed you with a turn-six Thorn Elemental in your first game, and while she hasn’t been lucky enough to draw it in this game so far, her Thalakos Mistfolk has been a fair substitute.

The good news is you’ve drawn and played your copy of Rubinia Soulsinger. However, you still had to wait one turn before Rubinia would come online, and Rain took advantage of that delay: She cast Enlisted Wurm, cascading into an Ursapine and suddenly making combat math a nightmare. You took 5 damage last turn on her attack, with Rain untapping most of her creatures due to a Copperhorn Scout.

You started your turn at 4 life, hoping for something that can turn this game around; while Rubinia can certainly help, she won’t be able to cut it on her own. Your draw is a Valorous Stance, which gets you considering the possibilities. Rain’s at a mere 8 life due to several Pain Seer activations, and you can’t help but think victory lies just at the edge of your grasp.

Unfortunately, you still have Rain’s defensive line to consider, with no fewer than six creatures waiting for your next move. You’re not sure if you have enough tools to get the job done, but there’s a strong chance Rain will break your defense over her knee next turn. If you’re going to put a plan together, now’s the time.

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

You are at 4 life with the following cards in play:

Whisperer of the Wilds

You have the following cards in your hand:

You do not know the identities of any of the cards that are currently on top of your library.

Rain is at 8 life and has no cards in her hand. She has the following cards in play:

Pain Seer

If you think you have a great solution in mind, don’t put it in the comments! Instead, send it to puzzles at gatheringmagic dot com with the subject line “Puzzle — Striking Distance” by 11:59 P.M. on Sunday, May 1, 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, Ryou Niji, Aaron Golas, David Jacobs, Matthew Harvey, Doug Potter, Hyman Rosen, Michael Blanchard, Kriz Lee, Bob Wilson, Andrew Muravskyi, Subrata Sircar, and Jack Guan.

“The decisions tree of this puzzle is really expansive,” Andrew Muravskyi remarks. “However, there are two chokepoints: First, we aren't going to win this battle without Reaper of Flight Moonsilver dealing some damage, so we have to cast her before our first turn ends. Second, we can't let Ming Han draw a random card—something like Pore Over the Pages can insta-kill us (draw two Fiery Tempers, cast one of them via madness, and hard-cast the other). This means we have to spend 5 mana on Reaper and 2 mana on Not Forgotten, and the only way to use the remaining 1 mana is Gryff's Boon.”

“Since we will be attacking entirely in the air,” David Jacobs continues, “Ming Han’s Dance with Devils is not relevant at all. However, we would like to keep our opponent from gaining life by stealing our Nearheath Chaplain and attacking.”

“Of course,” Matthew Harvey notes, “in order to pump Reaper of Flight Moonsilver, we need to activate delirium. We are currently half way to this with a land and some creatures in our graveyard. We can add a sorcery quite easily, so the question lies in how to add either an artifact or enchantment.”

As it turns out, you need to do both in order to win. Bob Wilson writes:

  • Cast Gryff's Boon on Paranoid Parish-Blade, making it a 4/2 with flying. Attack with it; Ming Han can't block and falls to 16 life.
  • Cast Reaper of Flight Moonsilver.
  • Cast Not Forgotten, making a 1/1 flying Spirit token and putting Deny Existence on top of Ming Han's library.
  • Sacrifice Gryff's Boon to attach Bound by Moonsilver to Gatstaf Ravagers (even if it’s already attached to it). We now have delirium.
  • Pass the turn.
  • Ming Han draws Deny Existence. Dance with Devils alone doesn't do anything, and neither does leaving back blockers, so his best bet is to steal one of our creatures with Malevolent Whispers and attack with everything.
  • Chump-block our stolen creature with the Spirit token. It doesn't matter what we do with the Sanguinary Mages—any line leaves us and our nontoken creatures alive. However, if Ming Han steals our Nearheath Chaplain, we should have Reaper eat the Spirit token during the declare blockers step so the Chaplain doesn't deal any damage and Ming Han doesn't gain any life. (This is why it's important to put Gryff's Boon in the graveyard on turn one, even though we could just as easily do it on turn two.)
  • Ming Han should have no other moves, so he passes the turn.
  • It is now our next turn. Sacrifice Wild-Field Scarecrow and Nearheath Chaplain to Reaper of Flight Moonsilver. Exile the Chaplain from our graveyard to make two 1/1 flying Spirit tokens; then, sacrifice those to Reaper as well. It's now an 11/7 with flying.
  • Return Gryff's Boon from our graveyard, and attach it to Paranoid Parish-Blade (in case he did leave a blocker or two). We still have four card types in our graveyard because of the Scarecrow (artifact, creature, land, sorcery), so the Parish-Blade is a 5/2 with first strike and flying.
  • Attack with the Reaper and the Parish-Blade. Ming Han takes 16 damage, going to 0. GG. I, for one, welcome our new angelic overlords.

Other solutions suggested returning either Dissension in the Ranks or Niblis of Dusk with Not Forgotten: You won’t be blocking with more than one creature, so the Dissension won’t have enough targets, and even if the Niblis represents a potential flying blocker, you can sacrifice a land to pin it down with Bound by Moonsilver.

“It's worth pointing out that it's a good thing that Reaper of Flight Moonsilver's Delirium ability specifies another creature,” Matthew Harvey clarifies. “Otherwise, Ming Han could have stolen it and had it sacrifice itself to make us lose our win condition!”

That said, you can still pull off a win if you decide to shackle your own Reaper. Kriz Lee does this for style points:

Notably, Ming Han has one more option: He can cast Niblis of Dusk and then cast Malevolent Whispers on the Niblis for a 5/2 flyer with haste . . . which will run right into your Spirit token when it attacks.

There are two more steps needed to close out this puzzle, as Michael Blanchard writes:

  • Pump fist.
  • Run home, high fiving everyone on the way.

Considering you just knocked your opponent down from 20 to 0 life in the course of two turns, you probably earned it.


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