Robot Viking

Now that the contest is over, here are the solutions to all five puzzles. If you still want to try and solve them yourself just for fun, don’t read this until you’re done!

Puzzle 1. The puzzle referred, of course, to the Fibonacci Sequence, a mathematical pattern in which the next number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. It also mathematically describes the shape of a spiral. Using the sequence in the block of text reveals the plaintext wording, “Leatherback Baloth Castin Cost.” I had to drop the “G” from “Casting” so the letters would fit into the three puzzle blocks, but I figured it would still make sense. Fibonacci drops a hint about the letters used to describe the colors in Magic casting costs, too, in case you weren’t aware of that. The answer? GGG.

Puzzle 2. This one almost fell apart because I didn’t realize that Google Book previews weren’t static. I thought everyone would see the same pages I saw. Luckily, Gavin  pointed out the Amazon preview. This was a basic book cipher, with the letters encoded in page/line/word/letter format. The plaintext, “Home is where you can find a decent graveyard,” is part of the flavor text for Braids, Cabal Minion. The puzzle mentions the obscured initials on the book, so you’d know the final answer is: BCM.

Puzzle 3. I ended up dishing out a lot of hints on this one, and I probably shouldn’t have. The answer is Rasputin Dreamweaver, so the final answer is RAS. How does the combo work? Tap all lands, play Rasputin. Aether Flash‘s triggered ability goes on the stack. In response, remove all the Dream counter from Rasputin and make 7 colorless mana. Allow the Aether Flash to resolve. Rasputin goes to the graveyard, and Enduring Renewal returns him to your hand. Tap Basalt Monolith. Now you have 10 colorless mana. Spend one to tap Azorius Signet. Now you have 9 colorless, plus a blue and a white. Spend a colorless to make a token with Thopter Foundry, sacrificing Sword of the Meek. Aether Flash‘s trigger goes on the stack, and so does the Sword’s “return to the battlefield” ability. Since you control both effects, you decide in what order they go on the stack, so put the Aether Flash there first, so it will go off last. Then keep responding and making Thopter tokens, piling up a bunch of Aether Flash triggers at the bottom of the stack.

When you’ve got four tokens (and have spent 4 colorless mana), activate the Clock of Omens, tapping four Thopter tokens to untap the Monolith and the Signet. Then finally allow the Aether Flash triggers to resolve, destroying all your new Thopters. Now you have 7 mana open, enough to recast Rasputin with one left over. Rinse and repeat.

For the record, you can make infinite mana with just the Thopter Foundry/Sword of the Meek combo (which is actually a big part of the dominant deck in Extended Magic these days) with the Monolith/Clock of Omens combo. Add a Time Sieve or Blasting Station for real fun. Infinite damage or infinite extra turns? Hm. Using the Signet and the two enchantments was just Bolas being a jerk. Consider it a Rube Goldberg combo.

Puzzle 4. As I mentioned, my brain wasn’t really up to creating something deep and complicated for this one. It’s a rail fence cipher, which essentially splits the plaintext into two lines and then writes them out in a way that makes the pattern slightly less obvious. It reads, “Dark Ritual Result.” Final answer: BBB.

Puzzle 5. Although it looks impressive, this is a basic monoalphabetic word substitution cipher, using Magic cards instead of letters or other symbols. All the usual methods for solving that type of thing apply (look for common word lengths, double letter combinations, and letter frequency). This was probably made easier by the fact that the wordings were “known” in that they came from the flavor text on Magic cards. So once you got enough of one to recognize the flavor text, you’d solve a huge chunk of the cipher. The next one I do will be harder — I’ll put all the cards into four-card blocks like real cryptographers, so you can’t spot “the,” “of” and “and” quite so easily. The plaintext is the flavor text from Anowon, the Ruin Sage, Iname, Death Aspect and Kyoki, Sanitys Eclipse, with an extra line that says, “I am a vampire like yourself,” leading to the final answer, ARS.

Related posts:

1. Rise of the Eldrazi Contest — the FINAL Puzzle
2. Rise of the Eldrazi Contest — Puzzle 4
3. Rise of the Eldrazi Puzzle Contest — Part 3
4. Rise of the Eldrazi Puzzle Contest — Part 2
5. Rise of the Eldrazi Puzzle Contest — Part 1