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[appleTRON]

After completely ruining my life over this card, I have come to this enlightened conclusion:

The only way we are going to get a correctly ordered (and possibly already keyed) deck is to wait for all the prime-numbered cards. That's it. Let's talk about this again when we have them, yes?

[BrianEnigma]

....well, not entirely. For instance, we know the "holes" and we know what playing cards we have not yet seen. It is just a matter of [exhaustively] guessing the correct locations of those cards as well as guessing the key word/phrase. I wrote code to try these combinations using the key IFENTROPYWINSOUTWARDLOOKSSHOULDLEAVEYOUCOLD (because that seemed like an obvious choice) and let it run overnight. There were just a couple of problems with this, though:

* Mainly, I barely made a dent in the possible search space. There are quite a lot of permutations for the missing cards in the open holes in the deck order.
* I guessed at the key. If I was wrong, the whole thing is moot, even with a perfectly ordered deck.
* I guessed that the output would contain the word "virus," "djinn," or "perplex." Because the cipher always outputs something, even if it is jibberish, it is difficult to know whether or not you have found the correct solution. You can't just visually scan millions of decryptions and hope you run across the right one. You also can't use a ton of processing to determine if a solve is correct or not, otherwise you increase the search time. An extra couple of seconds per try can quickly add up to extra weeks of processing time.

I think the next wave of cards will give us more primes, more playing card symbols, and will therefore decrease the search space (and required processing time.)

If anyone wants to take a look at my code, the C source is attached.

[oliverkeers13]

Just a little o/t, but still related to this card. In the grey banner at the top, it is divided into two sections. The left section is where the dull grey background for the text is, the right is where it isn't. The left side has playing card suits in diagonal lines going (from bottom left to top right (due to getting the suits the right way up) Hearts, Clubs, Spades, Diamonds. This might help with solitaire.
on the right hand side is a sort of marbled pattern that disintegrates as it goes further to the right.

[benbulben]

no key!

[Samn]

Could the passphrase be "Shuffled" seeing as that is the title of the card...
It's just a thought...

Sam.

[perplexed]

my thoughts are that it is just like ronseal, and the puzzle is in fact 'who djinned the academy', working along those lines i came to the conclusion that 'if entropy wins' means if your computer gets screwed up/djinned, and that 'outward looks should leave you cold' means then its noone outside, you should look within the acdemy for the culprit. Therefore the reference to the Joker and the Star maybe clues towards an academy members/students name. The last bit was pure spec, but you can quote me on the comp entropy bit

[oliverkeers13]

I was thinking, It's unlikely that the person's name will be 108 characters long, perhaps it's the heat sensitive bits that are code?

[pickwick the second]

Edit: Never mind, it's a less-than-useful question; please ignore this post. Thanks anyway, BriEnigma!

Good Morrow!

[BrianEnigma]

[oliverkeers13]

Just a small note, the map is backwards on this card. If you turn it in the same way as the other cards, the map is upside down. This seems odd, as it is the only one of 66.

[PC Tex Ripley]

Nothing new...

This being one of my first silvercards, I'm still working on it when I have time away from works etc.

The whole jist of this post was to reference about the 108 string, I know someone mentioned that it equates to 2 decks of cards including jokers, but it's also one deck of cards including jokers, with each card having a 2 digit reference ie., AH 2D 6C etc, but I'm not sure how this could be encoded into the 108 character string on the pack (if it's even that at all tbh) which could give us the layout of the pack when Garnet opened it.

I don't want to believe we have to wait for all the Puzzle Cards to have been issued before we can solve this one, given that the pattern of the card symbols printed on the Puzzle Cards is now known to relate to the shaded message.

I'm currently working with a solitaire decryption app, with a vast phrase list and 27 different deck layouts of non-shuffled cards running, but I'm currently starting to believe what it says at the top of the Puzzle Card; 'Shuffled'. And I'm starting to forget what outside looks like. If I find anything interesting I'll post it...

Oh and I think the heat sensitive letters is prolly the cipher, but just wanted to bounce the idea of the 108 string being a deck of cards if anyone knows of a possible alpha-numerical coding system to try...


Tex...

[WhatTheXXX]

Shouldn't the disappearing letters be completely ignored from hereonin:

(Wiki) "Traditionally, the ciphertext is written out in blocks of fixed length, omitting punctuation and spaces; this is done to help avoid transmission errors and to disguise word boundaries from the plaintext. These blocks are called "groups", and sometimes a "group count" (i.e., the number of groups) is given as an additional check. Five letter groups are traditional, dating from when messages used to be transmitted by telegraph:

If the length of the message happens not to be divisible by five, it may be padded at the end with "nulls". These can be any characters that decrypt to obvious nonsense, so the receiver can easily spot them and discard them."

[janajungle]

This is making my brain hurt.

I'm leaving the proper code breaky stuff to the people in here that really seem to know what they're doing. However, other things to do with the card - theres a lot of hot and cold going on - Djinns are always fiery hot and is it coincidence that this card has heat sensitive thingys on? But then outward looks leave you cold? Brain hurt again.

Also, djinns are from the middle east and are not made in China.

If the back of the card is the opposite way to the others in the set then that must be significant. Or a great big printing error.

Oh dear.

[JebJoya]

Heh, I was catching up with the US series 2 of lost, and was browsing the Lost spec forums (bloody hell they spout some bollocks in there), then coming back here, there's a link! 108!

4+8+15+16+23+42 = 108!

It's all linked, you see, MC's budget stretched as far as making Lost, and the magnetic thingimybob in the place (leaving it general so as not to spoil anything) must be the CUBE!!! IT ALL MAKES SENSE!

And the 3P are the mysterious "others"

Yay!

Jeb

[mobius]

I think we should ignore the playing card symbols on the other pxc cards. I asked Mind Candy and they said that each card's puzzle is solvable independant of other cards. Of course that gives us no excuse for trying to solve the card now