Whew. That was quite a ride.

After almost six years, I’ve brought my regular weekly Magic: the Gathering puzzles on GatheringMagic.com (and later CoolStuffInc.com) to a close. The title, incidentally, is completely accurate: I’ve written a total of three hundred separate Magic: the Gathering puzzles for them, week by week, between 2015 and 2020. This doesn’t count the puzzles on this website, so in terms of a grand total as of this writing, I’ve put together:

• 300 puzzles for GatheringMagic.com and CoolStuffInc.com;
• 50 puzzles for PerplexingChimera.com;
• 3 puzzles for an independent Magic: the Gathering-related project;
• 1 puzzle for a possible in-store event (which didn’t materialize).

So… that’s 354 puzzles as of this writing.

…Okay.

The decision to wrap things up was easy, as I wanted to spend some more time with family (and possibly explore other creative endeavors). I’m not sure if I’m going to end up creating new puzzles in the future, and I have to admit that the lure is strong: It’s difficult to look at new card previews and not think, “Huh, what if there’s a situation where you have to use this card like that?”

That said, I’m still inclined to maintain this website. It contains some of my earliest experiments with Magic: the Gathering puzzles, after all, and it’ll be nice to retain this as a record of my independent writings.

So it looks like I’ll need to revisit my last post here from four-and-a-half years ago, and update my to-do list:

• Change the look of the site. This was done some time ago, but I’ll try to make adjustments for convenience where I can find them.
• Make sure all puzzles have a direct link to their solutions. Yup, still working on this one. It takes a while to work up the inclination to update fifty different posts.
• Fix up “broken” puzzles. This might be interesting, as “fixes” for puzzles might involve plugging small gaps in their solutions… or overhauling them entirely.
• Fix broken images. The main concern here is that this will involve updating a lot of card names and mana symbols. If anything, this will be even more onerous than adding links to solutions.

In addition to the above, though, I might add one more thing:

• Write notes and guides. Although I’m unclear on whether or not I’ll be writing any more puzzles, I’d like to put together some notes on how some of these puzzles were made. That might help get someone to pick this up in the future, if they’re so inclined.

This is all speculative, though, and will depend on the time I have available (yes, I do have a day job). But if you’ll forgive the ramblings of a retired puzzle-maker, this should do for now.