Mari thrusts a pair of cards into your hands and dashes out of the store. You wonder how she managed to say that all in one breath.

Her opponent continues chewing her gum as though the whole exchange never happened. “She’s gone, huh?” she asks.

You nod. “What . . .  just happened?”

“She just asked you to play for her, I guess.”

You give her a confused look, but sit down anyway.

“I’m Cristina,” she says. “It’s your turn, by the way. Your friend drew her card already. She hasn’t gotten to her combat phase yet, though.”

“Er . . . ”

“They really have to get the toilets fixed here. The nearest place is two blocks down the street, so I guess your friend won’t be back for a while.”

“Ah, okay,” you say. “So . . .  what’s your life total?”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty?”

“And you’re at one life,” Cristina points out.

“I’m at one life?”

“Yup,” Cristina says. “You’d think your friend would have conceded by now. She insisted on playing, though — she cast that Flayer of the Hatebound last turn, took damage from my flyers on my next attack, and saw me cast my Rootbreaker Wurm. That Sorceress Queen’s probably the only reason why she’s not dead yet.”

“I’m at one life against your twenty?”

To her credit, Cristina’s expression doesn’t change. “Yup,” she says.

You calm down for a while. Your situation doesn’t make any sense — if she had to leave really quickly, why didn’t Mari just concede?

Eventually you come to only one conclusion: Mari thought that she had the win coming. But against this board, with these life totals? What could she have been planning?

And while you’ve been getting your thoughts in order, Cristina hasn’t stopped chewing her gum for a single moment.

“So,” she says, “what now?”

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

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

• Sorceress Queen
• Blazing Hellhound
• Flayer of the Hatebound
• Mana Echoes
• 4 swamps
• Mountain
• Urborg Volcano

You have the following cards in your hand:

• Macabre Waltz
• Vicious Hunger

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

You have the following cards in your graveyard:

• Foul Imp
• Final-Sting Faerie
• Fervent Cathar
• Corrosive Mentor
• Soul Snuffers
• Forge Devil

Cristina is at 20 life and has no cards in her hand. She has the following cards in play:

• Kor Skyfisher (tapped)
• Fiend Hunter (exiling your Foul Familiar)
• Colossodon Yearling
• Archangel
• Rootbreaker Wurm
• Knighthood
• 4 forests (all tapped)
• 3 plains (all tapped)

If you think you have a great solution in mind, don’t put it in the comments! Instead, send it to puzzles@gatheringmagic.com with the subject line “Puzzle — Infernal Engines” by 11:59 P.M. on Sunday, June 12, 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, Dominic Chan, Andrew Muravskyi, and Kriz Lee.

The sequencing defeated a lot of attempts at solving this puzzle: a lot of solutions ran into dead ends, missed existing traps, or followed red herrings. Controlling the number of cards in the graveyard was a particular sore point.

“It took me a while to go through multiple scenarios to finally come up with the solution,” Dominic Chan writes. “The only way to win is to deal some damage through attacking, but Kip has too many blockers. We need to stop him from blocking entirely by possessing a creature with 4+ power to activate Ferocious in Barrage of Boulders.

“Nimble Mongoose is pretty much the only candidate, but its Shroud stops us from equipping it with Shuko. Pendelhaven Elder is the only other way to boost its power, so we need to disable Threshold to make it a 1/1, activate Pendelhaven Elder's ability and then re-enable Threshold.”

“We want some of our creatures to get +1/+2 to survive two Volcanic Sprays,” Andrew Muravskyi notes, “but we also want some of them to die and fuel our graveyard, which is our most critical resource. Shuko gives us some flexibility by turning a 1/1 into a 2/1 and making sure it doesn't get the bonus from Pendelhaven Elder.”

Finally, Andrew adds: “If we can turn Threshold off and on again, we can also get the Raid Bombardment trigger from attacking with a 2/3 Mongoose, but deal combat damage as a 4/5.”

With all this in mind, Ryou Niji’s solution goes as follows:

“I stumbled on at least a couple of false lines solving this puzzle,” Ryou explains. “The first invalid solution I found involved using Flaming Gambit with X=1 to kill our own Pendelhaven Elder at instant speed, which deals 11 damage in total (due to Vithian Stinger pinging face) . . .  but requires 14 mana. The second one tried to make Vithian Stinger a 1/1, give it +1/+2, and use it as an attacker instead of Raging Goblin (which we could no longer recur because it gets +1/+2 too). That solution was looking good until I remembered the mandatory recover ability of Icefall, which messed the graveyard count up!”

“And with the necessary Threshold movements down (for Pendelhaven Elder’s ability), up (for Barrage of Boulders), down (for Raid Bombardment), and up again (for combat damage), you've drawn out a letter W,” Russell Jones remarks. “Just the thing that would look good on the scoreboard.”