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CardName: Challenge # 070 Cost: Type: Challenge Pow/Tgh: / Rules Text: Mark Rosewater said "Dragon's Maze was one of the hardest designs we've had in a long time because it had so many constraints put on it. I'll talk more about the design as we get closer." Design a Rare or Mythic Rare from Dragon's Maze Flavour Text: Set/Rarity: Multiverse Design Challenge None

Challenge # 070
 
Challenge
Mark Rosewater said "Dragon's Maze was one of the hardest designs we've had in a long time because it had so many constraints put on it. I'll talk more about the design as we get closer." Design a Rare or Mythic Rare from Dragon's Maze
Updated on 04 Mar 2013 by cmeister2

History: [-]

2013-02-20 17:19:03: cmeister2 created the card Challenge # 070

For later.

2013-02-20 17:21:00: cmeister2 edited Challenge # 070

Wah! It's not rot13 :)

LOL! Yeah, that's what I thought. Judging from the capitalisation, word lengths, punctuation and spaces, it definitely looks like English under some letter-replacement scheme.

But I assume that's always rot13, and it felt very surreal when I rot13'd it several times and it was just as incomprehensible :)

I tried a simple substitution-cipher solver online and it didn't produce an answer :)

Well, bonus points for cracking the challenge before it gets released :)

I guess I could just submit cards I think are likely to fulfil as many potential challenges as possible :)

Hmm... doesn't look like a rot, or any regular letter for letter exchange, actually. If the punctuation is to remain stable, then 'Y' in "Krisrsa'y" needs to be an 'S' or theoretically a very odd 'T'. But there's also the word "D'py" which also contains a "Y" at the end. I don't know many contractions that are spelled X'xs or X'xt. Then there's the word "Hetequ's" at the end. If this was a rot, then the last letter couldn't be 'S'. And, again, Apostrophe-tee is unlikely with a word that long. (Edit: Strike that. Both 'Wouldn't' and 'Couldn't' are that long. That would make this Rot1... if all the other letters matched...)

Heh. A few of us discussed this to some extent. "D'py" I think has to be "I've". There's also "ar'bi", which probably has to be "we'll"/"we've"/"we're"; and as you say "Krlrsa'y" and "Hetequ's" have to end with S or T. This all adds up to being something other than a substitution cipher. I tried a few simple Vigenere-like decodings, but couldn't get anywhere.

My guess is that the "Krlrsa'y Qsdz" and "Hetequ's Xldr" turn out to be the same thing.

I wonder if it starts "Mark Rosewater says"?

My submission: Implicit Maze. This is one of the few cases that mana burn would help a design, since then I wouldn't need the mana cost in the activation.

Hpgfciq ox gyo, fhm y nptewi frsoim xutl fbdp. Hiyr hgrz hhwc cud nxivyxwv! I'll submit a card later on.

Figured it out only because I could guess the rules text of dude's entry! ...Now I have to try to think of an entry.

(Decoded:) It's kinda fun to try this once before the release of Dragon's Maze and once after; first guess what the constraints are (and get them horribly wrong), and then have a go once we've seen the constraints and what R&D had to worth with.

2013-03-04 09:54:52: cmeister2 edited Challenge # 070:

releasing the challenge :)

What was it encoded with, BTW?

It was a Vigenere cipher using ChallengeSeventy as the key.

Yes; if you knew it was Vigenere (or at least were trying) then attempting the plaintext attack using Jack's comment above (Mark Rosewater says) would have gotten you most of the way.
You could also have run it through a Vigenere attacker; I toyed with a Python script which tried to crack it and it could guess a few characters. Importantly, there were 6 or so letters which were encoded the same, which allowed for guessing of the key length (16, among others). http://smurfoncrack.com/pygenere/index.php would have gotten you to 'Mfll Rcsrwrtng said "Ilbgcn'f Mrzn', and it's iterative from there.

­Combat Distortion and Blue Guild Alliance, another two that don't really work. I'm sorry, I seem to be fizzling a lot today :(

I made Ruric Thar, the Unbowed.

Also these seems like as good a place as any to ask if anyone is interested in trying to decode this.

Huh. That looks crazy, but it also looks like another letter substitution. Some symbols are repeated far too often to represent whole words, like in traditional Chinese. The little circles seem to represent word breaks... it's probably easier than it looks. That, however, is where I stop because I have work to do. ;)

I think it's probably a lot easier than it looks, but I don't know much about the methodology behind decoding ciphers.

Work is lame. :-P

I rolled this as one of my two challenges for Challenge # 073, the other being Challenge # 031! I created Emmara Tandris and Mirko Vosk.

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