Much to your surprise, you’ve been doing quite well with your Sealed League deck. The inclusion of a single pack of Eldritch Moon may or may not have been a factor, but you’re not exactly complaining about all the games you’ve won so far.

All good things have to come to an end, though, and you’re now playing the League’s final game before your local store begins preparing for the Eldritch Moon prerelease next weekend. Unfortunately, the person sitting across from you at your table is none other than Nox, who isn’t very happy about the last time you met, and who has spent the entire game getting under your skin.

Nox taps all eight of his lands and slams a Breaker of Armies onto the table. “I must break you,” he says in his best Dolph Lundgren impression (which, incidentally, sounds more like Adam Sandler talking with his mouth full).

You glare right back at him, but Nox is too busy chuckling at his own joke. After a while, you shake your head and just concentrate on the table.

You’ve been at a disadvantage for a while now. Nox played a Palace Siege a few turns ago, choosing the Dragons option to pad his life total and inch you closer to defeat with each turn. Your Docent of Perfection has done an admirable job on defense so far, but Nox also has a Noxious Dragon in play, and it’s a bad idea to trade the Docent for it. And with Nox’s recent casting of Breaker of Armies, the game is quickly spelling an end for you.

You untap and draw a Clash of Wills from the top of your library. It would have been a lot more useful last turn, but those are the breaks. Fortunately you already have a Lashweed Lurker in hand to stop the Breaker. Which gets you thinking . . . 

“You got eighteen damage up that sleeve of yours?” Nox eventually asks, after you take a couple of minutes to think things out.

You glance at his side of the board one more time, then finally reach for your lands. “I guess I have some bad news for you, then,” you say.

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

You are at 9 life, with the following cards in play:

• Copperhorn Scout
• Wirewood Symbiote
• Daring Sleuth
• Leaf Gilder
• Prodigal Sorcerer
• Byway Courier
• Docent of Perfection
• 4 forests
• 3 islands

You have the following cards in your hand:

• Clash of Wills
• Willbreaker
• Lashweed Lurker

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

Nox is at 18 life and has no cards in his hand. He has the following cards in play:

• Cinder Wall
• Olivia's Dragoon
• Howlpack Wolf
• Incorrigible Youths
• Noxious Dragon (tapped)
• Breaker of Armies
• Palace Siege (choosing Dragons)
• 4 swamps (all tapped)
• 4 mountains (all 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 – Cheaper by the Docent” by 11:59 P.M. EST on Sunday, July 17, 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, David Jacobs, Aaron Golas, Norman Dean, Jonathan Kustina, Hyman Rosen, Frankie Punzi, Paolo Scapin, Andrew Muravskyi, Bill Murphy, Subrata Sircar, Miko Losantas, Christian Shade, Michael Feldman, Matt Vorpahl, and jfranger.

“This puzzle's solvable for what you can't do,” Bill Murphy points out:

• You can't just target all of Claire's creatures: You've only got four creature-targeting cards, with no mana abilities you can activate.
• You can't push through enough damage: There's no creatures with haste.

Several people also noted that it was possible to get the Conifer Strider to 11 power or more through some combination of Servant of the Scale, Hunger of the Howlpack, Pinion Feast and Bone Saw . . .  but you still wouldn’t be able to get through Claire’s blockers. (“It'd probably just get chump-blocked by some monkeys who were in the middle of . . . some other business,” Russell Jones writes.)

“At first I tried to steal the Shivan Dragon,” Frankie Punzi writes,“and get it big enough to fly in for the win, but the biggest I could get him was 10 power (four +1/+1 counters from a Hunger-ed Servant and one more from the Bone Saw). That wasn't working, so I figured the solution had to use the Primordial Ooze.”

With only one creature-targeting ability that allows the creature to remain on the battlefield, this was a good chance for Unsubstantiate to shine. Paolo Scapin writes:

The most popular variant for this solution was to instead use Unsubstantiate to bounce Servant of the Scale. Since you own the Servant, this returns to your hand, at which point you can simply cast it and move forward with the above solution as written.

Russell also notes that Claire still has one (useless) move available to her: “She can activate Brothers of Fire twice in response to Primordial Ooze’s upkeep trigger, but this doesn't deal enough damage to end the game before the trigger resolves.”

“If the opponent had an instant-speed way to sacrifice the Ooze in response to its upkeep trigger,” Ryou Niji muses,“then the trigger can no longer put a counter on the Ooze, and it would have used last known information to determine the value of X, which would have been 10. This would have been a handy way to escape the rage of a giant ooze...”

So all in all, we get to see Willbreaker in action, use Unsubstantiate for some fancy stack tricks, and get one of Claire’s own creatures to kill her. That, and, as Christian Slade points out, “You also get to kill a Birds of Paradise with a 5-mana removal spell.” I guess nostalgia makes for more than just weird decks.