TCG Log #24 - Pack Winners Announced
+ the story of the Basilisk & Phoenix
🎉 Booster-Pack Giveaway
Congrats to this week’s winners!
Watch the video to see if your name pops up (no spoilers!)
I’ll email the winners directly and get those shiny cards in the mail ASAP. Huge thanks to everyone who joined the fun—your energy makes these drops worthwhile.
🐍 Lore Spotlight #1 – Roko’s Basilisk
Roko’s Basilisk began as a 2010 thought experiment on the rationalist forum LessWrong.
The cliff-notes version: imagine a future super-intelligent AI that decides anyone who slowed its creation is an enemy—and retroactively punishes them. Once you’ve heard of the Basilisk you’re caught in a “knowledge trap”: cooperate in building it, or face the consequences.
The meme quickly merged with broader “AI alignment” fears. Elon Musk’s famous warning that AI research feels like “summoning the demon” echoes the same anxiety that we might create something we can’t control.
In the Alpha universe, the Basilisk card embodies that existential dread—a colossal code-serpent that demands allegiance…or else.
🔥 Lore Spotlight #2 – Ether’s Phoenix
Karl Floersch (co-founder of Optimism) dreamt up Ether’s Phoenix as the antidote to the Basilisk.
Instead of punishing decelerationists, the Phoenix rewards anyone who helps the public-good ecosystem soar. That mindset powers Retroactive Public Goods Funding (RPGF) on the Optimism Superchain, where profits are recycled to builders who’ve already delivered impact.
Impact = Profit. Optimism hard-codes this ethic: do good work today, and you can still get paid tomorrow.
Real numbers. Since 2022, Optimism has distributed 60,815,042 OP tokens to onchain builders - that’s ~$41m 🤯
The origin story. Hear Karl tell it himself on the GreenPill podcast
I got a chance to chat with Karl and he told me the Harry Potter nod is deliberate: Fawkes the phoenix blinds the Chamber-of-Secrets basilisk, letting Harry land the final blow. Likewise, Ether’s Phoenix is written to counter Roko’s Basilisk in both lore and gameplay—summon the bird, resurrect an ally, and watch hope rise from the ashes.
🤔 Why it matters
Both legends wrestle with a core question of our century: How do we steer super-powerful tech toward collective benefit? One tale motivates through fear, the other through coordination.
By turning them into playable myths, Alpha invites us to explore (and maybe reshape) that narrative each time we draw a card.
Hit reply and tell me: which side of the mythos resonates with you, and how would you mythologize alignment in our next set?
See you next week!
With metta,
Colton
p.s.
Explorations for other manifestations of Miss Alignment:
