In the card game Magic: The Gathering, all cards have one or more colours¹, which is rougly equivalent to a faction in other games. This concept unifies the narrative and the mechanical aspects of the game:

• narratively, colour acts as signpost for “flavour” of the card - Red cards represent Dragons, Goblins, and Damage spells; White cards represent Angels, Knights, and protective spells, and so on².
• mechanically, the “Colour Pie” design philosophy suggests that all colours should be strong at some things and weak at others, to avoid an imbalanced game where one colour is always superior³.

Mechanically, the advantages of building a deck that includes many colours (and so, can patch up the weaknesses of one by by borrowing from another) are offset by needing to provide the mana base to support it - it’s no good having a great Red card in your hand if you only have Green mana sources that cannot be used to cast it. The Commander format takes this concept a step further by having each deck be led by a single iconic creature, whose Colour Identity is a hard-limit on the cards you can have in your deck - if your Commander is Blue and Green, you cannot include any cards in your deck that are White, Red, or Black.

Magic Players are, shall we say, known for their enthusiasm for ordered categorical structures. This colour system presents a natural objective - “build one deck for every one of the 32 possible colour combinations (including ’no colour’)”, the so-called 32 Deck Challenge⁴. This page is me charting my progress towards that goal.

A strange observation the other day - a disproportionate number of animal names are themselves verbs.

(Disclaimer - as with previous posts, this post was originally based on output generated by an LLM which I used to investigate and resolve the problem, though every word of it has been reviewed by my actual human brain, and meaningful edits were made)

I noticed something odd in my AdGuard Home dashboard: one host — culex¹, a Kubernetes control-plane node — appeared to be responsible for nearly 80% of all DNS queries on my network. My first thought was that something had gone wrong: a runaway process, a crashlooping pod making repeated lookups, or even something more sinister.

The reality was more mundane, though a neat opportunity to understand my tools a little better.