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I participated in the MIT Mystery Hunt last week with Cardinality. This was my first time hunting with them; I defected from ✈︎✈︎✈︎ Galactic Trendsetters ✈︎✈︎✈︎ because Cardinality was making a serious push to try to win this year, and a good friend of mine on the team asked me to help. Astute followers of this blog might notice that the last time I wrote a Mystery Hunt recap was in 2020 when ✈︎✈︎✈︎ Galactic Trendsetters ✈︎✈︎✈︎ won; I guess I'm just too lazy to write recaps for years when I'm not on the winning team.

Hunting with Cardinality was a pretty interesting experience since I've only ever done Mystery Hunt with ✈︎✈︎✈︎ Galactic Trendsetters ✈︎✈︎✈︎ for the past 8 years. One thing that surprised me was the turnout for onsite hunters, especially later into the hunt. Cardinality and ✈︎✈︎✈︎ Galactic Trendsetters ✈︎✈︎✈︎ have a similar number of registered hunters, but the number of hunters physically in the room on Cardinality on Saturday evening was easily 2x/3x the number of hunters in the room when I visited ✈︎✈︎✈︎ Galactic Trendsetters ✈︎✈︎✈︎ on Sunday. It's a bit apples-to-oranges though since ✈︎✈︎✈︎ Galactic Trendsetters ✈︎✈︎✈︎ hasn't tried to seriously win hunt for a while now.

The puzzles are currently available on two-pi-noir.agency, but will eventually be moved to the Mystery Hunt Archive. Lots of puzzle spoilers below:

So I graduated yesterday. It still doesn't feel quite real. The fact that commencement was done online certainly didn't help. I appreciated the sentiment, but the execution was lacking, and the whole experience felt "meh." I had the stream running on my secondary monitor, and there was never a moment when I considered the stream interesting enough to move to my primary monitor. Even putting my diplomas on the blockchain was more exciting than anything that happened during commencement, which is pretty sad since I'm a huge blockchain skeptic.

I participated in the MIT Mystery Hunt last week with ✈︎✈︎✈︎ Galactic Trendsetters ✈︎✈︎✈︎. This was my fourth time hunting with them, and my last time as an undergraduate (because I'm graduating, not because I'm quitting). I had considered making a post like this in previous years, but never bothered to do follow through; since we actually won Mystery Hunt this time, I figured that this year was as good as any.
I'm not going to add links to any of the puzzles here because they're all currently available on pennypark.fun, but will eventually be moved to the Mystery Hunt Archive. Also, keep in mind that I'm a novice puzzlehunter, in addition to being a bad writer, so take my commentary with a grain of salt. Lastly, and most obviously, lots of puzzle spoilers below. Read at your own risk.

Just wanted to share my short 2-month stint with Magic: the Gathering Arena.

• Late August 2019: I cave in and create an MTGA account. I was pretty hesitant about getting invested in MTGA, since I've played both Magic Duels and a game in the Duels of the Planeswalkers series in the past, and those games had very short lifespans.
• September 21, 2019: I give up my free-to-play status and drop $5 on the MTGA starter bundle. This is mainly so that I can purchase the M20 mastery pass before it goes away.
• Early October 2019: I craft Bant Golos because people on /r/spikes say it's the best deck in the format and I'm tired of playing budget Mono-Red Cavalcade.

I figured it was about time for me to post an update.

tl;dr: I've closed down my Etsy store, but the NGNL playing cards are still available here available for download here! Feel free to do whatever you want with them, which includes getting them printed.