Mystery File 10: The Radiant Riddle
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Crime Scene: The evidence you need to solve this puzzle can be found on certain Murders at Karlov Manor cards.
Upon reflection, I realized the only way to foil evil schemes is to shine the light of justice on them. Putting the pieces together may offer only a symbolic victory, but it’s worth pursuing nonetheless.
Use the pieces to reconstruct the grid on this page. Orientation within the grid doesn’t matter. After you’ve done that, there will be 12 symbols in the grid. Fill each empty square in the grid with one of those symbols to form continuous paths between symbols. Paths travel up, down, left, or right one square at a time. They don’t travel diagonally, double back on themselves, or cross other paths.
When the grid is filled, count the number of each symbol in the solved grid.
This puzzle involves certain foil cards in the set, where there are things hidden on the foil layer of certain cards that are invisible in the normal art. These variants were initially discovered on 02-02 by u/seanlee1205 on reddit. We were able to collectively gather images of all the foil variants via box opening videos, and partially solved the puzzle later that day. The remainder of the puzzle relies on information provided by the Mystery File, namely, the instructions on what to do with the grid and the provided decoder
I’ve provided images of the needed cards below this fold, as I don’t believe Scryfall has images up yet (nor do I know if they plan on it, given it’s hard to scan foils and preserve all the nuance of the foiling)
the radiant riddle - evidence
the radiant riddle - solution
We proceed as instructed, putting the pieces together into a grid
From there, we can solve it as instructed, drawing continuous paths between each paired symbol. It's basically a game of Flow. This gives us the following
The left image is as far as we got on 02-02. We weren't able to fully solve it to a card until 02-11 with the Mystery File giving us the decoder to convert our paths into an expansion code and collector number.
Following the instructions, we have an expansion code of 8 x 5 + 10 - 13 = 37, which is Guildpact (GPT), and a collector number of 6 x 8 + 5 - 7 = 46.
GPT 46 is Cry of Contrition, and our corresponding MKM card is Granite Witness, whose art has the same grotesque in the bottom right.
