MGU · Mint or Print · Series 001

Cultivating Creativity

The jar

Tissue culture is how one plant becomes ten thousand. A single node, sterilized and set in a jar of agar, divides into copies of itself. Keep the jars clean, keep them lit, and a shelf becomes a wall, and a wall becomes a room.

But cultures don't just copy. Multiply anything enough times and the copies start to drift. A leaf comes out with fenestrations that shouldn't be there. A color shifts. Once in a very long while, a jar produces something nobody has grown before, and a mutation becomes a cultivar with its own name.

That's this series. Fifteen jars of Monstera adansonii, drawn as a mutation ladder. At the bottom, the plant as it exists: the Type. Then the Sports, starting to change. Then the Chimeras, unstable and hard to keep. And at the top, the Myth: a mutation that has never happened, one copy, sealed somewhere in a million rips.

Something large out of something almost too small to see.

How this is built

Series 001 is not released on its own. It ships inside Local Rips, a free tool that lets any local card seller turn the inventory on their table into a rip game, on their own device, with their own name on the screen. The tool makes vendors money. The series is what the community gets for showing up.

Series 001 is free. Every rip is free and every card in it is earned.

Vendors are in it too. Any approved vendor gets a code. When a ripper uses that code at their counter and hits, the vendor receives a Vendor Set copy of that card with their name and town stamped on it. That copy is theirs. If the holder of a card mints it, the vendor's name is on the chain. If the holder prints it, the vendor's name is on the card. A shop in a strip mall gets published alongside the art, because a customer got lucky at their register.

Community is currency. The people who rip, the shops who host, the printers who print: everyone who takes part ends up in the record, and the record is the thing that has value.

Mint or Print

Every card in this series is a digital original. When you pull one, it's written to your binder with a serial number, the town it was pulled in, and the time. That record is the card. It exists once, it's yours, and it's visible to everyone in the public hit log.

What happens next is decided by the holder, one card at a time. That's the game.

Mint. Put the card on a public chain. The serial, the town, the timestamp, and the vendor stamp travel with it. Once minted, the chain holds the card and your binder shows where it went.

Print. Put the card in your hand. A US trading card printer produces it from the digital record, and the record is what makes the print worth anything: how many exist, where each was pulled, and by whom.

Or hold. Leave it in your binder on Digital Towns. The record is the same either way, and there is no clock on the decision.

Minting and printing open later. Until then, every hit sits in the holder's Digital Towns account. Holders with a digital store on Digital Towns can display their hits there.

Every card in Series 001 is earned by a rip. What a holder does with a card after they earn it is theirs to decide, and that includes the Artist Proofs held by MGU.

The ladder

Series 001 is Monstera adansonii, the plant the first jar held, drawn fifteen ways. The set is a mutation ladder. At the bottom is the plant as it exists. At the top is a plant that never will.

Type · 8 cards · 125 copies each The type specimen. True-to-form adansonii in a jar, the baseline every other card mutates away from. Eight jars, eight mediums, eight fields.

Sport · 4 cards · 25 copies each A sport is a spontaneous mutation: a new color, a new leaf shape, fenestration that shouldn't be there. These four have started to change.

Chimera · 2 cards · 5 copies each A chimera carries two kinds of tissue at once. Variegation, curling, fenestrations that break the edge of the leaf. Unstable, hard to keep, harder to propagate.

Myth · 1 card · 1 copy A cultivar that doesn't exist. Nobody will ever grow it. There is one.

Contam · everything else A contaminated jar. Every grower has thrown out more of these than they've kept. When you rip a Contam, the counter drops by one and you keep the record: your number, your town, the time. One of a finite set.

The pool

1,000,000 rips. 1,111 hits. 998,889 Contams.

Most jars fail. That ratio is not an accident and it is not a tax — it is the thing the series is about, made countable.

The pool was shuffled once, before the first rip, and sealed. The hash of the sealed pool is published here. The series ends when the last of the 1,111 hits is pulled — not when the last rip is taken, because a pool with nothing left in it is not worth ripping. At that moment the seed is revealed and anyone can verify that the pool was never touched. The Myth is somewhere in the million. It might be the first rip. It might be the last.

Pool hash: [SHA-256 published at launch]

Nothing is added to Series 001. Nothing is reprinted. When the millionth rip is taken, the series closes.

The cards

[Card art for each appears here on the published page, front and back.]

Three copies of every hit

When a card is pulled, three records are written at the same moment.

The ripper gets the card. It goes in their binder with the serial, the town, and the time.

If the rip was made with a vendor's code, that vendor gets the Vendor Set copy, stamped with their name and town. A record that a hit happened at their counter.

MGU gets the Artist Proof.

Same art, same serial, three owners. All three are in the public hit log.

How to rip

Five rips a day for anyone verified with a phone number on file. One more for sharing your pull. Five more for every person you bring in, once they've taken their first rip.

Rip at a vendor's counter with their code and they earn a Vendor Set copy if you hit.

Series 001 is free to rip. Every card is earned.

MGU × Digital Towns · Mint or Print · Series 001 · Built for local sellers