Ravioli Preparation Games

A friend of mine recently had the luxury of attending the Ravioli Preparation Games, the premier competition for ravioli-cooking.

Naturally, they gave out goodie bags, and my friend, ever gracious, offered the entire thing to me, claiming ze didn't need another novelty spatula with the games' logo on it. I accepted, of course, and found something curious inside-- an issue of Stuffed, the official Ravioli Preparation Games periodical! I'd like to share some excerpts of the articles within-- I'm sure you'll find them delightful.

"On tableside guacamole"

...My longtime followers know where I'm going with this. Tableside guacamole is the premier food. While I might enjoy the occasional compound butter or marinara to augment my ravioli, I admit any ingredient I have for either would be better served as a component of a tableside guac. The reason for this is simple: tableside guacamole is interactive. Any old food can taste good, but tableside guacamole has power beyond that. A transcendentally good salsa might give the diner ideas about the recipe for the salsa; even a mediocre tableside guacamole, however, lays its recipe bare and asks its audience to participate.

A friend once told me that he had a bizarre idea about an egg, the process of eating which would inspire diners to call their local congressperson. Surely he expected me to ask how his political egg would work, but I was unconcerned with this-- I incuriously assumed such an egg could exist. I had bigger game, after all.

"Chef," I told him, "I'm sure your egg is good-- but if it were tableside guacamole, a true interactive food, you could involve calling one's local congressperson as an act of eating. Your radical scramble is impressive, but eggs as a medium lack the inherent power of tableside guac."

"Everything is a recipe"

...Every chef worth their kosher salt knows this: everything is a recipe. Even if it is not written down, it is impossible to cook food without performing a number of steps manipulating that food in sequence-- which, of course, is what a recipe really is. Yet let me read you the first words from the world-acclaimed YouTube series "You Can Cook! with Madame Beurre":

"You don't need a recipe!"

She says this sincerely, directly-- bluntly, even. Now I respect Madame Beurre, and it is beyond debate that "You Can Cook!" is invaluable to old and new. She's certainly changed more hearts than me, and anyone who's tasted her banh mi ravioli knows her talent!

But imagine you are new to cooking. What do you have to gain from being told a technical falsehood?

 "The 2020 Competition: Looking Back"

...outrage at the 2020 Ravioli Preparation Games. The reason? The winning entry, deconstruction iii, was not a ravioli-- or so said some detractors! A number of arguments were made to this point, including the following:

• deconstruction iii did not envelop the filling-- it simply surrounded it, leaving room for the inner works to poke out.
  
• deconstruction iii had literally no nutritional value (at the time, this was not thought to be possible). A ravioli, it was widely believed, should use its fillings to provide varied and balanced nutritional value.
• deconstruction iii had more sauce and garnish than filling, decreasing the importance of the filling that is a natural prerequisite for ravioli.
• deconstruction iii advertised itself as not requiring eating to be beautiful or appreciated. This sparked debate over whether a ravioli not intended to be eaten is technically a ravioli.
• deconstruction iii handled mozzarella innovatively. The artist first dissolved a clump of mozzarella in water. They then drew ire by diluting this water in front of an audience until, probabilistically, not a single molecule of mozzarella remained, then used this water as an ingredient. Critics dismissed this as "going too far", "disconnected from any semblance of artistic tradition", and "derivative of un-ravioli for the new millenium".

These complaints, in hindsight, look childish. We can see now that deconstruction iii is certainly more of a ravioli than Narcissus Looks Into The Stadia and Seas, the controversial "bathtub ravioli" from earlier this year...

"Against fanciful sides"

...since nobody else in the ravioli community is willing to say it, it falls to me: the so-called fanciful sides movement is a hoax. I remember my first encounter with one of these fanciful chefs well. Before me was a perfectly passable plate of ravioli, triple-fried (as was the fad at the time) with a creamy lobster stuffing. I was ready to judge-- but also to dig in!

But the chef would not allow me to simply enjoy a meal. Her eyes glittered as she instructed me to perceive what she claimed to be a "fanciful" untasteable side in the empty bowl to my left: polenta. Everything she described was not to my taste-- curious, since she could have described anything. She instructed me to only eat it if I found the lobster raviolis to be getting repetitive.

The other judges on the panel fell for it-- one even pantomimed spooning a dollop of polenta into her mouth, nodding and laughing. Personally, I was disgusted. If this polenta were necessary, shouldn't it be material, rather than fanciful? And if it will never come up (a likely case-- each bite of her ravioli was unlike the last, so I never needed a break) why have it exist at all?

If this were just artsy-fartsy bullshit about the difference between taste and flavor, it would be fine. But when people walk past my stand at the Big Bread Convention and spend their money on some hack who can't even prepare polenta...

"Letter to the editor #1"

I am disappointed that you published "5 Lovely Recipes!" last February. I have written over thirty cookbooks and edited thirty more, including the romantic cookbook "Macademia Nut Hearts". Your "sexy skillet-starters" were cute, if lackluster. Much less cute was your insistence that they share the collective spotlight with my recipes that integrate themes of love into everything from filling to pasta to plating.

You're telling people that they can take their grandpa's cookbook, swap some ingredients, change the oven time to "333, like three pairs of kissy lips", and call it good. You are just a bunch of disgusting men starving your readers who make a living off selling cookbooks.

"My Time With Madame"

...Madame Beurre taught me an important lesson that day. All throughout culinary school I had been taught that food was more than just the sum of its ingredients-- you might like chocolate, and you might like ketchup, but not together. Trying to impress Miss Beurre, I told her this, expecting her to ask me why I agreed or disagreed. But she skipped that step-- she asked why I thought that.

Eventually I mustered an answer, which seemed to impress her: combinations of ingredients invoke cuisines, a form of collective knowledge, and we grow up with cuisines. After some thinking, she agreed, and told me she liked that thought. I was prepared for a complicated, nuanced response.

Her next instruction was simple, though, scraping off years of baggage: Let's make something. A ravioli, let's say, and we'll see what happens. We used the microwave a lot, and integrated everything we knew, from the pancake batter Miss Beurre's kids loved to the toppings on the cheap bagel pizzas I ate every Thursday in college. We even served it on a paper plate like I used to eat, and Beurre showed me her family's dinnertime routine.

It was incoherent. I'd never serve it to anyone. It was also the most fun I've ever had cooking-- and because of that, even if I'd never serve it to anyone other than her, it was one of the most delicious things I've ever tasted...

"On Realities and Teaching"

 ...I love teaching technique. My cooking career is built on them. In a perfect world, I would do nothing but introduce chefs to my beloved techniques, teach them everything I learned at the Tesselation bar and restaurant. I would make dishes out of the change in my coin purse, and serve them to everyone, and feed the world.

The reality, though, is a lose-lose situation: I don't particularly care for the ins and outs of knife work or grill management or which expensive salts to use when, nor do I want to use expensive ingredients or work alongside professional food photographers. Yet in order to demonstrate my ideas about flavor combinations, I must master every step along the way, or pay someone who has. And I had best do so with expensive and exquisite ingredients!

I fear for my students-- and quite frankly, my customers, who are focused on the foreign sensation of seeing a duck press for the first time. They must think my ideas are so much more obscure than they actually are!

"My Lamb Ravioli Recipe (The Point Of It All)"

...a number of artists created sheet music that separated itself from Western notation, or more generally any notation that prioritized notes. Their reasoning was that if the sequence of notes were just as important as dynamics, emotions, imagery, instrumentation, and so on, it was unreasonable to create sheet music that proposed that the notes were the point of it all, resigning concepts like "crescendo", "84 beats per minute", and "like a butterfly's wings" to marginalia...

 

...Now I'll get to the point of it all. Here, for the first time in print, is my infamous lamb ravioli recipe, the very same that won me the 2014 Games:

lamb, five-spice, cornstarch, sesame oil, rice wine, eggs, flour, scallion for sure, some sort of heat, some sort of acidity. You are momentarily an astronaut playing helmetless in Jupiter's gases; breathe them in-- how would you describe those blooming scents to your parents? I am describing what I imagined, looking up at my mother performing alchemy on the stove above me.

 

My child watches me cook, and I selfishly wish for them to imagine the same fantasies I did, just as I simultaneously hope they tell me the worlds they visited someday. Now feel the lapse in inertia as you hit the ground again, O meteorite ablaze, jostling your bones and knocking your heart up your spine into your head. Best piping hot.

SP117: An Item For Fantasy Games

The Item Itself

The SP117 is a wand with the approximate size, shape, and color of a yellow highlighter and the approximate weight of a gallon of yellow paint. There may be various insignia on it, usually matching those of a well-funded army, or a group of protesters that stole it from an army. It has “117” printed on it in bold, uniform type.

Someone familiar with it would offer you approximately the price of a nice piano for it, probably looking to pawn it off on a government or war historian.

When used, it transports any being capable of being injured, and anything they’re touching, to another plane. (The floor won’t come with you, but your bag will, and the rug might.) This looks like vaporization to the untrained eye. After each shot, the wand will prompt the user, by way of an inaudible magical whisper, to “shake or fire again to continue”. If the wand is not waved or fired again within five seconds, it will then transport anyone holding it, and anything they’re carrying other than the wand, in the same way. The wand itself will try to teleport to a nearby shelf or table in the original plane, or, failing that, fall to the floor.

SP117 has five charges. It takes anyone trained in magic worth their salt about ten minutes of repetitive, intense work to charge it up again fully.

The Sanctuary

SP117 transports beings to a gigantic hexagonal room, with mighty, glossy metal walls and floors. It smells as if every scent molecule more interesting than “faint sickly-sweetness” has been eliminated. There is a 10-foot circular rug on the floor, decorated with geometric patterns. It is cheap, but incredibly comfortable.

The text “SP117” is printed along one wall. Below it is simply encrypted text that reads ALUR DEATHTAKER, WITH MUCH RESPECT: STAY OUT OF THESE WALLS when deciphered.

To the right of the labeled wall is a contraption with an interface of buttons, a basin at the top labeled “HOLY SYMBOL OR FOCUS ITEM”, and several smaller drawers, labeled and stocked with common components for healing spells. When operated it allows one to cast a spell hands-free. The interface is difficult to learn, but is barely a hindrance when mastered.

Moving further right, there is a door labeled EXIT. It takes approximately six minutes to leave, most of which is operating well-known magical machinery. Those who leave will arrive in the original plane, in the same room as the wand.

Directly opposite the labeled wall is another door, leading to a room with identical dimensions. In it lie nine adjustable bedframes without mattresses and parts to a tenth, a bookshelf with long, vapid books, and a comfy loveseat. It also contains a stall with a toilet and a kitchenette stocked with a magically never-ending supply of water and palm oil soap. A compartment with a trash receptacle contains a broken but salvagable wand of brisk shrink, a cumbersome wand which causes an item to shrink to pocket-size for approximately ten minutes.

Another wall has an ancient interface embedded in it. By pushing blocks labeled “1”, “2”, “4”, “8”, and so on in and out, it provides a binary representation of important stats of any being standing on the rug-- height, weight, a number corresponding approximately to how many thwacks from a club it would take to kill them, and so forth. It also provides numerical codes corresponding to the strongest curse inflicting them, the last kind of magic they cast, whether they are allergic to various families of healing spells, and so on.

There is a secret compartment below this interface, triggered by pressing one of the blocks with the digit worn off by fingerprint oils. It contains six healing potions, each diluted with seven parts water.

Along the last wall is a locked door labeled NETWORK. To unlock it would take entering a 6-digit passcode. Entering three incorrect codes springs a trap that has long run out of ammunition. It would take a little less than 30 hours to brute-force. What could lie beyond it?

10 More Cursed Magic Cards

If you missed the first installment, I'm part of a local friends' discord where we run a "cursed cube": an exploration of the rules of Magic through custom "cursed" cards that forsakes ideas like "new player experience" and "printability". I crave people thinking the things I do are cool and good, so I'm posting another ten cards from that cube today, in the hopes of Engagement.

Among other things, cursed cards are a love letter to Magic's storied history and rules. They're also an aggressive wondering of what Magic could look like if it didn't need to be marketed or sold or intended for a large enough group of people. This is a vision of magic with transgressive mechanics, sharp in-jokes, and neopronouns in oracle text-- things that don't sell packs in a short enough time span for Wizards to okay.

In case it's not clear, there are custom cards here. If you are contractually bound to avoid custom cards, leave.

...

Let's just jump in.

1. Creatures you control get +1/+1 and antimonarchism

 Utopian Vision 3GU 

Sorcery 

If you control no Nobles, draw a card for each type among creatures you control.

flavor text is that terry pratchett quote. you know the one

"Diverse creature types matter" as an archetype is a fun concept. The thing is, when the cards are being designed for a constructed format (or, in the case of cursed cube, benefit from satisfying the illusion of belonging in a constructed format) the design always has to work around changelings. There are ways to deal with this-- Ikoria cared about non-Humans, Zendikar Rising used party and thus created wording for "largest number of creatures with unique types" that doesn't sound like a programmer wrote it. This is another construction.

The flavor color pie here is funny, too-- Simic is the most likely to take "diversity is our strength" at face value (by contrast, I think Orzhov, outside of its Ravnican guild interpretation, might quibble and "okay but are you implying you wouldn't like marginalized folks if it weren't profitable?")

Technically, though, "Draw 254 cards" isn't that busted of an effect-- in most decks, I'd rather draw, like, 3 There are jank combos, though-- I feel like if I were designing this for a set in the style of Modern Horizons, I might price it more aggressively, but make it "Destroy all Nobles, then...". I hate Laboratory Maniac effects with a burning passion, but I smile at the idea of indestructible changeling combos with Labman.

2. Taxation without board state representation

 Tax Evasion (no mana cost)

(black) Instant

If you control two or more Swamps, you may cast this spell by paying {0}.

Add {B}{B}{B}. Spend this mana only to pay for the effects of spells and abilities your opponents control.

Tax fraud is just funny as a concept.

One thing I keep asking about this is whether it's a bend/break. The naive response would be "It's fine, black gets fast mana, and abilities are allowed to get more efficient when they're situational." To which I say: A spell for {B} that destroys target creature with flying uses all black effects, and doesn't really combine them in the obviously breaky style of "Create a guy with deathtouch that fights target creature", but is clearly a break, in the same way that Rosewater argues that Path to Exile is a break based on its efficiency.

In this case, I'm leaning on the side of break, but I'm conflicted. The bottom line, to me, is that you shouldn't be splashing black because you want to force your thing through counterspells. On the other hand, though, a lot of the effects this card stops are white, making this a sort of subtle color hate in the same way that blue's enemies frequently get "This spell can't be countered". And in the same vein of "Every color should get card advantage, but only blue's should be board-agnostic", it can be argued that every color should get stack interaction, but only blue's can be general and unconditional. Perhaps the more interesting argument to have than "Is this a break in current pie?" would be "Is this better for the game as an implied addition to the pie?".

The thing that's stopped me from changing it outright? The flavor. The greatness at any cost color doesn't have time for your silly little tithes.

3. If there's anything a werewolf hates, it's bad flavor text

Collared 2W
Enchantment-- Aura

Enchant creature

Enchanted creature has summoning sickness. (It can't attack, block, or {T} unless it has haste.)

If enchanted creature would transform, turn it facedown instead.

If there's anything a werewolf hates, it's a collar. Especially Avacyn's collar, the symbol of her church, which is attended by the Cathars, such as Thalia. While everyday pooches would be halted in their pawprint tracks by an ordinary collar, the werewolves of Innistrad, the plane we're on, are much fiercer, due to their supernatural strength brought by the full moon. These collars are made from silver by Avacyn herself. This is not unlike the talents of her sisters Sigarda, Liesa, Bruna, and Gisela-- although the last few of those won't be making any more werewolf collars anytime soon. Because Avacyn killed the one and the other two were melded together into Brisela, that is. Which is not good. In that, it's bad. Painfully bad.

//

Anyway-- about the flavor text for CW13: Cynthia proposed the following:

"Octavia looked up at the silver disk that gave her power, and down at the silver disk that took it away."

I don't think the reader necessarily gets that the silver disks are the moon and collar-- I know the art is there, too, and I'm sure they'll do a great job, but you know not everybody cares about the art. Spikes, am I right? I was thinking, what if we added a line? Something like "That is, the moon and her collar." I think the tropes should carry it from there. Let me know what you think.

Cheers!

Mark

Wow, remember when Ancient Grudge was the most heavy-handed Magic flavor writing in the public eye? WotS Forsaken is best known for its bi-erasure, but I really think that overshadowed lines like "something the two of them shared in that great chemical mix-- arcing between them like one of Ral Zarek's lightning bolts".

Anyway, this is the first card in the cube intended to have double-facedness purely for flavor text purposes. I think that's funnier than using a really small font.

Also, "summoning sickness" isn't defined in the non-cursed rules, but it's not a terribly difficult change. At least to me, using the words "summoning sickness" makes a card that usually compares unfavorably to Bound in Gold seems more powerful than it is. Makes me grin a leonin grin.

4. just a normal card don't mind me

Daydreaming UU
Enchantment-- Aura

Enchant tapped creature

You control enchanted creature.

This one's self-explanatory once you get the joke, and I don't have much else to say, so I'll present it as a puzzle-- why does this spell get to be significantly cheaper than the five-mana Enthralling Hold? (If you get stuck, the answer is found in CR303.4c.)

5. Sorry I'm late, I was avoiding the Hydras

First District Legionary WW
2/1 Creature-- Loxodon Soldier

Mentor, protection from creatures with earlier timestamp

Is this wording better or worse than the equivalent "protection from creatures that entered the battlefield before it"? Who can say? I like the charm of using an unnecessary technical word in cursed cube.

This is my spin on the classic "white low-drop with ability that makes it an okay topdeck". It should almost certainly not be able to block, or gain the protection through an activated ability, or something. But it dies to Bolt or a topdecked 3/3, and it seems like a fun card to push, so I want to playtest with the card as-is just for science. It's hard to evaluate, even if my intuition is that its real good.

6. A contemplation of the hyperreal

Just An Old Wives' Tale W
Instant

Exile target nonland, nontoken permanent. It becomes foretold. Its foretell cost is equal to its mana cost.

The most cursed part about this is that, unless I missed something, it requires literally no rules revisions to fit into black-bordered Magic. It isn't even unclear. It is a fiction that rivals the fictitiousness innate to reality. It is Borges' map that blends seamlessly into the territory it maps, a hyperreality. It breaks the color pie more offensively than the rules, by a wide margin.

Perhaps it is just an old wives' tale. Perhaps the grains of truth therein come from abundant seeds.

7. LEGACY IS RIUNED!!! !!!!!!1!!!!

Spell Gobble {sU}{sU}
Instant

({sU} is sacrifice mana. It can be paid for with {U} or by sacrificing an Island or blue permanent.)

Counter target instant, sorcery, or planeswalker spell unless its controller pays {3}.

Nothing to say here, other than fixed phyrexian mana being the Mel-baitiest Melbait, rivaling only sorcery-speed counterspells and WUBRG planeswalkers.

I like this one, though, even if it's """spiky""". "Sac an untapped island, counter most noncreature spells" seems admittedly pretty strong, especially with modality, but the modes of "super conditional Negate", "really awful Abjure", or "the most painful Daze of your life" sound okay. I also like how, unlike phyrexian mana, you have to at least pretend you're respecting the color pie to cast this.

Originally this was without the tax, though. Imagine not having that knob to turn.

8. Colossal Deadmeme

Colossal Dread 4BB
Sorcery

Target opponent chooses a creature they control. That creature gets -6/-6 until end of turn. If its toughness is negative, its controller loses life equal to the magnitude of that toughness.

hehe dreadmaw

At heart, I'm a designer of boring old commons and uncommons, which sometimes clashes with cursedcube's tendency to do complicated shenanigans. I let myself indulge in boring commons because when you're making a cube of 300+ custom cards, you sometimes want one that only takes one read.

I have the opponent choose the creature because I don't want the pattern of "Colossal Dread, burn you out" to occur with no counterplay, but now that I'm looking at it for the first time since last September I wonder if just hitting their biggest guy is better.

HEADS UP: These last two entries have math jokes, and a lot of numbers generally.

 

9. Number Theory 101

Denominate 1B
Tribal Instant-- Nerd

If target creature's power is greater than its toughness, it gets -X/-0 until end of turn, where X is its toughness. Otherwise, if its toughness is greater than its power, it gets -0/-X until end of turn, where X is its power. Then, if its power and toughness are positive and not equal, repeat this process.

Example: I have a 3/7, you cast Denominate. It becomes a 3/4, then a 3/1, then a 2/1, then a 1/1, then the spell is done.

There's a lot of math in this batch, and it's partially because of Strixhaven having a lot of math cards. As a mathematician, I have opinions on this. I can't be too annoyed at the color pie handling-- even though there's math to be found in all five colors, and most mathematicians I know have a relationship to math that's somewhere on a spectrum from azorius to grixis, in the context of STX it's understandable and expressive to say that Simic is the math colors.

What's profoundly unacceptable in 2021 is to make a card called "Golden Ratio" that has nothing to do with the mathematical concept. Boo! If Gwent can make a mechanic that subtly rewards you for knowing Fibonacci numbers so can we!

Anyway, the card. Absent of serious funny business, this process always terminates, and results in its stats both being the greatest common divisor of the creature's starting power and toughness. This is a corollary of Euclid's Algorithm.

There's plenty of funny business, though! To the card's credit, though, a lot of seeming edge cases work as you expect-- for example, if you cast this on a 1/2 with an anthem effect in play, it will work the same as casting it on a 2/3. The real corner case is if the power and toughness of the targeted creature are switched through another effect-- if you don't see why the word "positive" is on there, that's why. (The difference, for the rules-inclined, is that power-and-toughness switching happens in sublayer 7d, after stat addition and subtraction in 7c.)

This process always terminates under normal conditions, but unfortunately there are multiple effects in the cube that can switch the order of the layers, which can cause this process to keep looping. While fractions are fine, the card also breaks if it has, say, pi power. Literally can't win 'em all. If I really wanted to prevent those cases, I might make turn it into a spell that does only one step of the algorithm, but with a buyback or replicate effect.

The thing is, though, if I'm worried about a combo between this card and something that reorders the layers, that's not this card's fault.

10. Number Theory 401

Four-Square Theorem 4BB 

Tribal Sorcery-- Nerd 

Each player distributes X -1/-1 counters among creatures they control, where X is their life total. For each creature they control, a perfect square number of -1/-1 counters must be placed on that creature in this way if able.

I wish there were a more elegant way to express "perfect square" in this context, because the math in this card is super under-the-hood otherwise.

Anyway, this is cool because it looks like a busted board wipe-- if the opponent is at 20, that's 20 -1/-1 counters on their guys! Doesn't that kill their whole board?

Well, no. For example, if the opponent has a random 0/1 Goat, and they're at 16 life, placing 16 counters on their scape-Goat is a completely valid option, since 16 is a perfect square (as is the amount they're putting on their other guys, 0). Similarly, if they're at 17, placing 16 on their goat and 1 on a random other guy works. 15 would be worse for them-- there's no way to express 15 as the sum of three or fewer perfect squares, so no matter what they do, they'll have to place counters on at least four guys using 15 = 9 + 4 + 1 + 1. They have other options if they have a large board (e.g. 15 = 4 + 4 + 4 + 1 + 1 + 1) but they aren't appetizing.

The natural question is what the best life totals are! Luckily, a guy named Joseph-Louis Lagrange proved something relevant, presumably in the pursuit of winning in custom Magic (very popular in 19th century France). His theorem states, in part, that every positive integer is expressible as the sum of no more than four perfect squares. Basically, a player will never be forced to put counters on more than four of their guys.

The real judge calls happen when you want to place 7 counters, but your opponent has just two guys. (The only way to make 7 is 4 + 1 + 1 + 1.) At the time of writing, the rules don't know what to do with that "if able"! However, the card implies an update to the rules to the game, and the most obvious one mirrors the existing rules for combat requirements (i.e. the stuff that makes "~ attacks each turn if able" work). If that's the case, you satisfy as many requirements as possible-- so if you're placing 7 counters on two guys, placing 1 + 6 or 4 + 3 is fine. Sounds like a headache, though-- as the unofficial rules manager for the cursed cube, and as someone who absolutely will be writing up mock CR changes to accommodate these cards, I'd appreciate your support in this trying time.

But Natalie Libre! How do I support you in this trying time?

That's all folks! What was your favorite cursed card? Tell me in the comments or on Twitter! Even a simple "thanks i hate Demonimate, nice work" in the comments is super appreciated.

If this inspired thoughts or cards from you tell me-- it'll make my week! Until next time!