The Black Lotus. The rarest and most powerful card from the very first collectible card game, nearly unattainable.

Until now, as a set of collectible NFT pieces. Each birthed from the real, physical Black Lotus card living at the centre of its soul.

If you’ve ever tapped lands to cast spells, you know the unrivaled power of the Black Lotus: 3 free mana of any colour at no cost and no drawback.

Even if you’ve never played the game, you know the lore: the most powerful card, from the first printings of the very first collectible card game ever made. And also, the rarest and most valuable.

Official Black Lotus cards can never again be printed or made. The ones from 1993 are all we have left. They are made of simple cardboard, and cardboard doesn’t last forever… Unless…

We have secured an authentic Black Lotus card, and will infuse it into digital form, so it can live on eternally.

How?

We conduct a sacrificial ceremony. We destroy its physical form, while together we mint its essence into NFTs on Ethereum.

By verifiably sacrificing the Black Lotus’ physical form, we ascend it from the constraints of the physical world: custodianship, proof-of-liveness, physical peril, and insurance against risk.

And with that, we shatter it into digital pieces, democratizing its ownership and cryptographically provable custodianship to YOU.

There will be no more than 10,000 Lotus NFTs born from this physical Black Lotus. We are releasing the first 2,000 as an Alpha Edition on Ethereum.

To secure yours, pledge your Ether to the Mirror crowdsale. At its close, you’ll own a proportion of $mLOTUS tokens. You can spend a fixed amount of those tokens for one Lotus NFT, or buy/sell your $mLOTUS in a Uniswap liquidity pool. If this overview sounds confusing, don’t worry. Clearer and more detailed instructions will follow.

WHY A BLACK LOTUS? WHY THIS BLACK LOTUS?

Not just any real-world item of value is a worthy candidate for transmutation from our world to the metaverse. A Lambo or a diamond ring have real-world value, sure, but that real-world value is nearly inextricably tied to the real world. The value of a Lambo is in its exquisite construction, and your ability to deploy that construction toward a common, useful purpose– driving from A to B– in a way visibly more luxurious than the quotidian. The value of a diamond ring is in its display by wearing, and the symbolism evoked by its physical connection to the finger that wears it: of status, of wealth, of bequeathal, of love.

The value of a Black Lotus is in many ways extrinsic to its physical qualities. Not completely extrinsic– its fragility as decades-old card stock ascribes relative value between specimens of varying condition– but its worth derives from qualities beyond the paper on which it was printed:

• It’s a game piece
• It’s such a powerful game piece that it is banned from nearly every format in which its game is played
• That power and status has grown along with the complexity, longevity, and popularity of its game
• As its game’s narrative and story has been built out, it has become a driver of demand for new game pieces that refer back to it, resulting in emergent lore
• It is scarce
• It is physically irreproducible, being of finite supply, and protected from future printings by a legal concept called promissory estoppel
• It is a Veblen Good, an economic curiosity whose demand increases with price, instead of decreasing

These qualities have so overshone the Black Lotus’ already notable beginnings, that its ties to the physical world are in some ways as fragile as decades-old cardstock handled across hundreds of card games.

In March 2021, I held my first ever Black Lotus in my hands, the culmination of achievement first imagined as a childhood Magic player, and I wondered: what if I broke that tie?

My authentic Black Lotus is not the best. It is not the rarest of all printed Black Lotuses. It was played over an unknown number of games, and not kept in pristine condition. But it is something I thought I could never afford, earn, or have, as a child enthusiast for the game. Many years later, as an adult, the game captured me once again. My efforts in the cryptocurrency field made it possible to work toward, so I got to work. Then I sought one out, and acquired it.

Out of the context of this Proclamation, I don’t want to destroy my Black Lotus! Who would? Out of context, it is an insane act, wantonly self-destructive.

But I am fascinated, as I have been for a long time, about the possibilities evoked by cryptocurrency, by permissionless networked money and assets, by decentralized provable ownership. I think the sacrifice could do something wonderful. I think it could transcend the Lotus and its lore beyond the longevity of paper card stock, in the digital realm. I think it could teleport past the divisibility limits of self-sovereign ownership of physical things. I even think it could establish a precedent– or at least, ignite the conversation– on how we might preserve other cherished physical things on-chain forever.

HOW DOES ONE PAPER CARD BECOME TEN THOUSAND DIGITAL SELVES?

A short time after I fulfilled my childhood dream by acquiring my Black Lotus card, I met the person who we now call the Keeper of the Lotus. Having built common ground over our shared interests in cryptocurrency and Magic, the Keeper posed a question: “How could we make NFTs out of a Black Lotus?”

We talked about the obvious things first: the interest in tying the physical to the digital, and the potential to tap demand for wider ownership of something scarce that was not previously divisible. The fractionalization of a digital asset is well-trodden ground; we assessed applying that simple function to a physical asset. Imagining how it would scale, we quickly ran into problems.

Where do we keep it? Who bears that cost, that risk, that responsibility? What happens if it gets damaged, stolen, lost or destroyed? How do we prove, to any owner at any time, that the asset they own is as and where they expect it to be?

How do owners get to use it? Hold it, in their hands? What if one fraction holder further fractionalizes their fraction? What if they all do? What happens when physical rights of access, and responsibilities of safekeeping, get diluted beyond a practical scale?

The complexity of such a thought experiment very quickly moves from exciting creative iteration to tedious management. It gets overwrought and over-complex. Any joy of ownership becomes diluted. The magic fades fast. “If only,” we thought, “we didn’t have these physical constraints.”

It was then we realized: destroy the Lotus.

Destroy the Lotus. Remove the physical constraints. No more upkeep, no physical responsibility. Absolution from physical risk by wilfully, deliberately realizing peril on the fragile object, rather than protect it at perpetual cost.

How, then, to confer the value of the destroyed physical object to anywhere else? Isn’t it simply gone? Isn’t that common knowledge, how everyone knows destruction works?

Not if we tell the story of its sacrifice toward a purpose. We create the narrative in good faith, and we make its lore more real than common knowledge. We construct a ceremony in which the Black Lotus is provably destroyed, at the same time as the creative action which bears forth its digital selves. We invite anyone to participate, to become a part of that ceremony, to provably own a piece of the outcome and the self-granted blessing to recount its tale.

Could we fail? Of course. But this is how we’re going to try.