Solution: Sets

This puzzle is a mashup of two card games: Set and Magic the Gathering. The former is clued by the puzzle title; the latter is discoverable by searching some images or text from the last group of 4 cards.

Those last 4 cards are all real MTG cards, with titles redacted:

• White Sun's Zenith
• Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit
• The Mimeoplasm
• Black Lotus

The color underlining tells you to take the first word from each title, to get the clue phrase WHITE OF THE BLACK. (The colors imply that “White” and “Black” should be treated differently than “of the”; that will come in handy later). Solvers hopefully then should notice that for the 8 main pages of cards in this puzzle, the first 4 appear on white backgrounds and the last 4 appear on black backgrounds; this will also come into play later.

The rest of the puzzle involves 8 groups of 12 cards each. These cards are stripped down versions of MTG cards, with the red herring art implying that the image part doesn't matter. Similar to how cards in Set have 4 features, each with 3 possibilities, these MTG cards only have 4 pieces of information; while they have more than 3 possibilities in MTG, not all are used in this puzzle, and within each group of 12 presented in this puzzle, only 3 distinct values appear:

1. Color: white (W), blue (U), black (B), red (R), green (G), or hybrid colors (e.g., UG)
2. Mana value (1-3, shown as the # of mana symbols)
3. Expansion set symbol: Amonkhet (AKH), Guilds of Ravnica (GRN), Throne of Eldraine (ELD), Kaladesh (KLD), or Ixalan (XLN)
4. Artist: Adam Paquette, Deruchenko Alexander, Kev Walker, Magali Villeneuve, Winona Nelson

This allows the solver to play a game of Set with the cards and identify a specific set of 3 cards that form a valid set, listed below. Recall that in the game Set, a valid set is one where for each feature, the 3 cards either each cover 1 of the possible values or all have the same value. In these MTG sets, each valid set differs across 3 of the 4 features and then has 1 feature all with the same value.

The first 4 values (from the cards presented with white backgrounds) allow solvers to look up a single MTG card, perhaps through something like the Gatherer wiki. There is only one card from Amonkhet with art by Magali Villeneuve, mana value 3, and white: Start. (Note that it is a split card with Finish, but the “white” color refers to the Start side.) Similarly, the next set of 4 values (from the 4 groups of cards with black backgrounds) uniquely clue Expansion.

Subbing in “Start” and “Expansion” for “white” and “black” respectively in the WHITE OF THE BLACK cluephrase, solvers can then get START OF THE EXPANSION, which is the full answer.

The assigned answer had Akira thinking about Magic the Gathering because of the many expansion sets in the game, as well as the Expansion card. Ali realized there was also a split Start card, and as a non-MTG player, expansion “sets” had her thinking about the card game Set as well. She proposed the mashup of the two games partly to keep non-MTG solvers from having to dive too deeply into a MTG rabbit hole, so that solver energy could go towards puzzling instead of reading MTG wiki pages.

Once they decided on which 4 features and possibilities to use, the bulk of the construction revolved around creating groups of 12 where exactly 1 set existed. We first chose the intended values of the correct set and then took a stab at semi randomly filling out remaining card values, but eventually leaned on validation code (Python script) to help verify our results. Sometimes we were able to nail 1 set on the first try; other times we started with 6 and had to swap out values until we got it down. Once the desired card values were set, we used https://mtgcardsmith.com/ to generate a million fake MTG cards (you da real MVP).

During the hunt, we were pleased to hear that non-MTG inclined solvers who initially felt skeptical of the puzzle often ended up having a fun time playing Set and ultimately enjoyed it, finding that it was a lot less intimidating than they'd anticipated. We did realize though that the concept of mana value sometimes tripped up teams who were less familiar with MTG. The mana for the intended card, START, is 2 + white; while this is equivalent to 3 mana value, it was sometimes interpreted as 2 mana value instead, leading solvers to try out a different card called “CAST OUT” with 4 mana value (3 + white). If we had caught this earlier, we would have tried to incorporate some colorless mana into the cards across the 8 pages to teach solvers about mana value calculation, although that would also make the values a bit less clean for Set.

Some of our favorite quotes from early feedback:

• “my favs were long cube and sets, which were also the two puzzles i wanted to avoid at all costs upon first glance LOL” — from a member of “the astronaughts ඞ traded their original name for some magic beans”
• “sets was yet another lesson in "just try it" — it looks (to me) like one of those puzzles you don't want to do, and then it continues to look that way for a while, and then you're forced to do it, and then you figure it out and it's actually really good in the end 😆” - from a member of Crazy About Punishment

While writing this solution, we nearly used the word “set” to refer to: the Set card game, expansion sets in MTG, set(ting) the puzzle, the set of 4 cards at the top of the puzzle, the 96 barebones MTG cards presented in this puzzle, each of 8 sets of 12 cards, a set of 4 sets of 12 with a white (or black) background, a valid set of 3 cards from one set of 12, a set of identical values across said set of 3 cards, or a set of 4 values that uniquely identify a real MTG card. Hopefully we managed to squash all but 1 of those meanings.