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[firefox]

hmm, ok this was a new deck, so all cards would have been in order

[BrianEnigma]

[Flidget Jerome]

[tanner]

thats interesting text -- knew it was strange

[am520dj]

i forgot where to look for this or how to do it, but could the text be a solitaire cipher? *shudders at thought of virtucube*

the only thing strange about the text was the LUL, as the only group of three letters.

[BrianEnigma]

Because I just typed it in for the catalog, here it is in ASCII (not sure if the bolding is on purpose or not):

[Leeravitz]

Looks to me like the basic (*very basic*, given my cryptographic skills!) distribution of the letters is about normal, for what I'd assume is a substititution cipher of some sort.

Possibly miscounting (!) and missing out some of the fainter text at either end (which is difficult to read via scan), the numbers work out at something like the following:

A - 5 occurrences
B-5
C-2
D-0
E-2
F-5
G-6
H-6
I-5
J-5
K-2
L-4
M-7
N-2
O-4
P-2
Q-2
R-4
S-3
T-5
U-4
V-5
W-6
X-6
Y-6
Z-1

That's not as helpful as it could be, partly because the text is very short, but it looks normal enough to me on face value.

Thus, the obvious guess would be that M, W, X are likeliest to be 'E', 'A', 'T' in some permutation...and then it gets a bit trickier...

[SteveC]

At first glance, that looks like a playfair cypher to me...

[seannyob]

not playfair

[Leeravitz]

Still wondering, if it is a square cipher, whether 'If entropy wins, outward looks will leave you cold' is somehow meant to serve as the key for the substitution. Although, from Garnet's point of view, I don't see how that would have originally been helpful...

[SteveC]

Just a little bridge on this again, but I think that there has to be a link between "outward looks" and picture cards, eg, royals. And "leave you cold" and flush (which actually leaves you hot?).. So if entropy wins you'll get a royal flush....?

Still makes no sense, but maybe it'll trigger something somewhere?

The odd thing is that the joker is never used in poker (ok, not REAL poker, just home games where pople like to turn it into a game of chance with wild cards). But as (tanner?) said, marking one of the jokers gives you 54 unique cards instead of 53 or 52...

[Flidget Jerome]

The marked Joker I think is what's making people think of Solitaire, since that's a feature of it, but the problem with that system is you need to know the order the deck's in. I thought the message on the side might have something to do with that, but there's too many letters.

[SteveC]

Right....

So, this is definitely a Solitaire Cipher. I hadn't appreciated that till I just sat down and read all about them.. The "If entropy wins, outward looks will leave you cold" is certainly a clue to the "key" to ordering the deck.

The only thing is to decipher the clue (cryptic crossword?) to get the key, plug it all together and decrypt.

For what it's worth, because of the odd 3 letter "word" at the end, I guess we're talking about two cipher texts here.. Actually, come to think of it, that leaves it open to a technical attack assuming both have been decrypted using the same deck. Anyone good enough at cryptology to achieve that?

[firefox]

[tanner]

well i keep playing around with this clue and not getting very far but i do know that if entropy wins then the universe is heading for the "Heat Death" = death of heat

maybe cold????

outlook is cold??