To your surprise, your first opponent of your afternoon Battle for Zendikar prerelease is an elegant, well-dressed woman who appears to have stepped out of the pages of a magazine. Apologizing for her appearance, Octavia explains that she just came from some weekend work (which remains a mystery to you) and didn’t have enough time to change.

Your third game begins on an auspicious note: You pull out a couple of early creatures while Octavia floods on lands. Unfortunately, that’s when your deck betrays you. You draw five straight lands while Octavia drops an Ondu Greathorn to stabilize the board and prevent you from attacking. A late Ruin Processor eventually brings her life total to more comfortable levels.

Sensing victory, Octavia goes for the risky play: She plays a tenth land and then activates her Coralhelm Guide twice and sends the Greathorn and the Processor (as well as a Mist Intruder) to deal you 12 damage in one blow.

As you draw your card for the turn, you marvel at how the tide has turned. Then, you look at the new card in your hand and curse silently when you realize that it’s yet another land. It’s a Mortuary Mire, though, and at least it has an extra ability attached to it.

Octavia has been pushing this game quite hard now. You wonder if there’s any way you can push it right back.

It is the start of your first main phase. Defeat Octavia before the end of your turn.

You are at 2 life with the following cards in play:

• Zulaport Cutthroat
• Dominator Drone
• Eyeless Watcher
• 5 Swamps
• 4 Forests

You have the following cards in your hand:

• Mortuary Mire (drawn during your draw step)
• Grave Birthing
• Rising Miasma

You have not yet played a land for this turn. You do not know the identities of any of the other cards in your library.

You have no creature cards in your graveyard.

Octavia is at 9 life and has no cards in her hand. She has the following cards in play:

• Mist Intruder (tapped)
• Coralhelm Guide
• Ondu Greathorn (tapped)
• Ruin Processor (tapped)
• 5 Plains (tapped)
• 5 Islands (tapped)

Octavia has no cards in her graveyard and has no cards in her exile zone as well.

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 — Push It”. We’ll include the best ones in next week’s article along with the next puzzle!

Last Week’s Puzzle

Correct solutions were received from David Jacobs, Maarten Wybaillie, Aaron Golas, Russell Jones, Norman Dean, Andrew Muravskyi, James Parmenter, Matthew Harvey, Franky Rodriguez, Luke Simpkins, Steve Serksnis, Martin Bobovsky, Quadrangolo Tetra, Eric Henderson, Erin Dixon-Gonzalez, and Vik Patel.

• Dross Scorpion’s ability triggers whenever an artifact creature dies (so a destroyed noncreature artifact won’t trigger it). That said, the latter half of its ability can untap any artifact.
• Creatures that die and are returned to the battlefield are considered as “new objects”—they won’t remember any changes that happened to them in their previous lives. (So if Krark-Clan Stoker became an artifact creature, died, and then was returned to play by Coffin Queen’s ability, the reborn Stoker would not be an artifact.)
• Coffin Queen exiles the creature that it animates only if the Queen herself dies or becomes untapped. If the animated creature dies, it is considered a “new object” in the graveyard, and untapping or killing Coffin Queen won’t exile it from there as a result.
• Firemaw Kavu can indeed target itself with its own enters-the-battlefield ability.
• Firemaw Kavu doesn’t have to die for its 4-damage ability to trigger; it just has to leave the battlefield somehow.

There were more than a few great pre-solution analyses for this puzzle. James Parmenter writes:

Conveniently enough, you have two cards that allow you to build access to Dross Scorpion’s ability: Silverskin Armor and Liquimetal Coating. These, however, have their own little quirks. Silverskin Armor has an activation cost and can only turn creatures into artifacts at sorcery speed. Liquimetal Coating is far more versatile, but it is limited to a single use unless you can find a way to untap it.

As it turns out, you need to turn more than a few cards into artifacts to resolve this situation. David Jacobs’s solution is as follows:

Several people also advised of a slight variant to this solution—you can tap Liquimetal Coating to make Krark-Clan Stoker an artifact, equip Silverskin Armor to Coffin Queen, and then have Firemaw Kavu’s final enters-the-battlefield ability kill the artifact Stoker. This allows you to attack for 5 damage with a 2/2 Coffin Queen and a 3/1 Dross Scorpion.

Luke Simpkins points out an important bit here: “You must use Liquimetal Coating to turn Coffin Queen (or Krark-Clan Stoker) into an artifact and then equip the Firemaw Kavu with the Silverskin Armor. If you reverse these methods of turning these two creatures into artifacts, you'll come up short later on.”

Franky Rodriguez notes that there is an even more interesting variant on the above solution:

A particularly creative variant notes that Dross Scorpion’s ability triggers on any artifact creature dying, not just the ones you own. This opens up solutions like Maarten Wybaillie’s:

“The exact order of which of Nox's three creatures we target with the Kavu's ability doesn't matter,” Matthew Harvey writes. “Even if we target the Rhinos first and the Orator last, they all still die. I bet Nox thinks that we would forget about the pump from the Blessed Orator so he would be gloating about it before the realization sinks in of what is actually happening.”

“Nox has only himself to blame,” Andrew Muravskyi adds. “He could have stopped our killer Queen shenanigans by keeping Scavenging Ooze mana, and two blockers would have been enough to prevent lethal. He experienced a misfire, and instead of being in the lap of the gods, he's going to have a sheer heart attack. Not that we mind, of course.”