Locations
Xian nods. “I can’t use the Regeneration attached to it, right?” she asks.
“You can try, but the Enfeeblement puts its toughness to zero.”
“Okay,” Xian says, putting the Warthog into her graveyard.
With the announcement that Core Sets (or some reasonable facsimile) are back in Magic’s release schedule, your local game store has put together a special Sealed Deck event. As a result, you and Xian are playing purely with white-bordered cards, all of which come from some of the earliest Core Sets of the game.
“I’ll tap 4 mana to cast Sage Aven,” you say, and when Xian acknowledges it, you go over the top four cards of your library.
So far, it’s become painfully obvious to you that the subset of white-bordered cards has a serious gap in its power levels: Either the creatures are really good, or they’re barely playable. But like any good improviser, you’re working with what you have.
You stack the top four cards of your deck, then turn back to your opponent. “I’ll pass the turn,” you say.
Xian draws a card, thinks for a second, and then taps two of her lands. “Pacifism on the Sage Aven?” she asks.
“Go ahead,” you say.
“I’ll attack with my Serra Angel, my Spined Wurm, and my Pegasus Charger,” Xian says.
“I’ll block the Wurm with my Cyclopean Mummy,” you eventually decide.
“Okay. Take six damage, and go down to three life?”
You hesitate for a second, then scribble your new life total onto your score pad and put your Mummy off to the side of the table.
“I’ll tap 4 mana and cast Karma,” Xian announces, playing the last card in her hand.
“Karma?” you ask.“What happened to the Reverse Damage?”
Xian gives you an odd look. “I never said I had a Reverse Damage,” she says.
You curse at your mistake. You were this close to winning! And she wasn’t even bluffing! And now, well . . .
“That Karma’s going to hurt,” you say, forlornly.
“I’ll end my turn now,” Xian says. “You can still activate your Crypt Rats for the draw, you know.”
You glance at her side of the board, and then look at yours, giving the situation a few minutes’ thought.
“No,” you finally say. “I’d rather go for the win.”
Xian has just declared the end of her turn; you may still cast spells or activate abilities in response
Defeat Xian before the beginning of her next combat phase.
You are at 3 life, with the following cards in play:
- Blood Pet (with your Thrull Retainer attached)
- Soldevi Sage
- Blighted Shaman
- Nether Shadow
- Crypt Rats
- Sage Aven (with Xian’s Pacifism attached)
- Black Lotus
- Tanglebloom
- Strands of Night
- 2 Islands (one tapped)
- 6 Swamps (five tapped)
- Underground Sea
You currently have a single card in your hand:
After casting Sage Aven during your turn, you know that the top four cards of your library are as follows:
- Vicious Hunger (topmost card)
- Phantom Warrior
- Onulet
- Swamp (bottommost card)
You still have a substantial number of cards remaining in your library, but you do not know the identities or order of those cards beyond the top four.
You have the following creature cards in your graveyard:
- Sea Spirit (topmost creature card)
- Murk Dwellers (second creature card from top)
Xian is at 6 life and has no cards in her hand. She has the following cards in play:
- Resistance Fighter
- Rushwood Dryad
- Giant Badger
- Pegasus Charger (tapped, with Xian’s Carapace attached)
- Serra Angel
- Spined Wurm (tapped)
- Moss Diamond
- Karma
- 4 Forests (three tapped)
- 5 Plains (three tapped)
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 — Bad Karma” by 11:59 P.M. EST on Sunday, June 25, 2017. 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 Addison Fox, Russell Jones, Paul Seitz, Florian Kupferschmid, Aaron Golas, Dominic Chan, Hyman Rosen, Ryou Niji, Subrata Sircar, Enrique Cordero, and Bill Murphy.
Subrata Sircar sums this one up nicely: “Calciderm is a hard creature to remove. Fortunately, it doesn’t fly, and the Power Matrix lets our creatures fly. We just need to untap it.”
The most common submission involved just that, as Bill Murphy explains:
- Choose to cast only the Absolver Thrull. In response:
- Tap Power Matrix targeting Brackwater Elemental (now a 5/5 flying, first strike, trample creature).
- Tap Fatestitcher to untap Power Matrix.
- Tap Power Matrix targeting Prowling Serpopard (now a 5/4 flying, first strike, trample creature).
- Cast Familiar's Ruse on Absolver Thrull, returning Briarhorn to our hand. Familiar's Ruse has no effect because of Prowling Serpopard’s ability.
- Absolver Thrull resolves. Destroy Lignify.
- Evoke Briarhorn, targeting Brackwater Elemental (now an 8/8 flying, first strike, trample creature).
- Cast Nature's Spiral, returning Lignify to our hand.
- Cast Lignify, grounding Wall of Air.
- Cast Prey Upon, eating Malakir Bloodwitch with Brackwater Elemental.
- Go to combat. Send Brackwater Elemental at Esserem and Prowling Serpopard at Valgan. Neither has a flying blocker, so they both bite the dust.
“It turns out that When Will You Learn? is not as useful as it seems when you are trying to finish off both opponents on the same turn,” Ryou Niji writes, “although here it does serve the important purpose of giving Familiar's Ruse a target.”
This solution has one interesting variant, which involves tapping Power Matrix a third time. Addison Fox starts off with the same Absolver Thrull / Familiar's Ruse sequence, but then goes into the following:
- Prey Upon the Malakir Bloodwitch with Fatestitcher. This marks one damage on the Bloodwitch and kills Fatestitcher.
- Unearth Fatestitcher. Tap it to untap Power Matrix a second time.
- Tap Power Matrix to give Ticking Gnomes +1/+1, flying, and trample (now a 4/4 flying, first strike, trample creature).
- Move to combat. Attack Valgan with the Brackwater Elemental (5 damage in the air) and Esserem with the Serpopard and Gnomes (9 damage in the air). Our Heroes have, collectively, one flying blocker in Malakir Bloodwitch — a 4/4 with 1 damage marked. It also has pro-White, but our only White creature is our stolen Absolver Thrull, so that's not especially important.
- If the Bloodwitch goes to bat for Valgan's defense, we can evoke Briarhorn to give the Elemental +3/+3 and trample for 5 lethal damage over the three remaining toughness in the way.
- If the Bloodwitch instead blocks the Prowling Serpopard or the Ticking Gnomes, we can give *that* +3/+3 with Briarhorn for a similar result.
Subrata Sircar also points out that there’s a further variant available: Instead of using Prey Upon to kill Fatestitcher, you can use Ticking Gnomes instead:
- Sacrifice the Ticking Gnomes to deal 1 damage to Fatestitcher.
- Cast Nature's Spiral to return the Gnomes to your hand.
- Cast the Gnomes and sacrifice them to deal 1 damage to Fatestitcher. Fatestitcher dies.
- Unearth Fatestitcher, then tap Fatestitcher to tap the Malakir Bloodwitch.
- Cast Prey Upon to have Prowling Serpopard fight the Wall of Air; the Wall dies.
If you’re wondering about the Doomsday Specter, though, Russell Jones points out that there’s an alternative line of play that involves casting it. This has the added bonus of allowing Esserem to cast his Essence Scatter as well:
- Play both Doomsday Specter and Absolver Thrull (they're free, after all), but respond to both of them by tapping Fatestitcher to tap Wall of Air.Esserem can't counter either spell with a puny little mortal thing like Essence Scatter, so they both resolve.
- Absolver Thrull triggers and destroys Arrest.
- Doomsday Specter triggers and returns Fatestitcherto your hand.
- Play Prey Upon to have Prowling Serpopard fight Malakir Bloodwitch.The damage is lethal to both of them.
- Play Fatestitcher, then counter it with Familiar's Ruse bouncing Briarhorn (which you can do now that you no longer control any Cat Snakes). Esserem can also try to counter it if he wishes.
- Evoke Briarhorn. It's a spell, so Essence Scatter can counter it now, but if it does, no big deal. If it doesn't, give Ticking Gnomes +3/+3.Either way, Briarhorn is now in your graveyard.
- Play Nature's Spiral to get back Briarhorn, then evoke it again. If it was countered before, it definitely won't be now, since Esserem no longer has a counterspell up. Give Ticking Gnomes +3/+3, making it either 6/6 or 9/9.
- Unearth Fatestitcher, and as this is an activated ability, it can't be countered by Essence Scatter regardless.
- Tap Power Matrix to give Brackwater Elemental +1/+1 and a heaping helping of keyword soup, then untap the Matrix with a hasty Fatestitcher and tap it again to do the same for Ticking Gnomes.
- Go to combat and hit Valgan with the 5/5 Brackwater Elemental, and Esserem with the Ticking Gnomes that's either 7/7 or 10/10. Both have flying, and all the flying blockers are out of commission, so it doesn't matter that they can share blockers across party lines.
Finally, Ryou Niji also points out that this scenario can get much more complicated when you factor in the possibility that either Esserem or Valgan can concede at any time. When you take the first solution into account, we have the following to consider:
- Valgan can concede before we could cast Familiar's Ruse targeting Absolver Thrull. In this case, no Briarhorn shenanigans are possible, but we can simply swing two 5-power fliers at Esserem, who may only have a 4/4 blocker with 1 damage.
- Valgan can concede after Absolver Thrull enters the battlefield, but before we could choose a target for its ETB ability. In this case, we may have to target our own Vernal Bloom. But since all this happens at the beginning of our main phase, we can simply tap our mana in response.
- Esserem can concede in response to our Prey Upon. In that case, we can only give one attacker +1/+1 and flying, but since only Valgan is left, that's enough. (Although to be optimal, we should probably untap Power Matrix before tapping Wall of Air.)
