CaNG III (Rules and Information)

[Peter_Rotten]

Create a New Good Deck Contest III!

Entry Fee: FREE!

Prize: A bunch of cool stuff! (To be determined soon!) If you wish to donate prizes, click here.

Prizes
1 Leyline of the Void (donated by ME!)
1 Goblin Charbelcher (donated by ME!)
A bunch of foil lands (donated by ME!)
4 Zach Tartell's Sister-signed Grozoth (Lonelybaritone)
4 Zach Tartell Signed Enchantress' Presence (Lonelybaritone)
1 Foil Rebuff the Wicked (SVG Mental Magic tech) (Lonelybaritone)
1 Russian Foil Biron Stoutarm (Lonelybaritone)
4 Mental Note (signed and modified by Bardo)
1 Judge Foil Balance (anonymous donation)
1 Judge Foil Phyrexian Negator (anonymous donation)
1 Judge Foil Gemstone Mine (anonymous donation)
1 Unlimited Psionic Blast (Anwar101)
4 Chalice of the Void (donated by Deep6er)
1 Engineered Explosives (donated by Deep6er)
1 Gemstone Mine (donated by Deep6er)

Unofficial Donated Prizes: the prizes below become official when I receive them in the mail.
1 Foil Textless Damnation (Happy_Gilmore - if over 25 WELL THOUGHT OUT AND TESTED decks are submitted. Happy will be judging this himself.)

?
Don’t like the prizes? Well then take your entry fee and put it up your pooper.

What you have to do: Create a new and viable deck for the Legacy format.

General Rules and Whatnot:

Dates:
We’ll accept entries from the opening of the contest until Friday, February 8th, 2008.
That gives you over six weeks!
The winner will be decided soon thereafter, definitely* sometime before February 29th (leap year, bitches!)

Rules
Some of these rules may seem slightly subjective, but we’ll do our best to be as objective as possible.

Submitting an Entry:
1. Start a new thread in this forum for your deck.
2. Include a description of general strategies, card analysis, and testing results (see #3 in Acceptable Entries).
3. Contestants may only have ONE entry. If you post a second entry, I will delete it; so please choose your entry carefully.
4. Follow all the normal rules of the board.

Acceptable Entries:
1. The deck’s concept must be generally new and original. Something like Food Chain/Evoke would be considered a fine entry, but a deck like U/r Trix would not be accepted. Previous winners included a preliminary build of Rifter, which was acknowledged as one of Legacy’s strongest control decks for awhile, and Ninja Survival, a Survival-variant with a rather unique spin.

2. Revisions of existing archetypes will be accepted if they contain a significant change. Removing four lands from Zilla Stompy (R/g mid-range) and replacing them with four Lotus Petals would not be considered a significant change. Building a typical Fish deck with the addition of Tombstalker doesn't seem particularly original. However, merging Dragon Stompy with Angel Stax for an R/w Stax variant that could win on turn two could be considered a significant revision. If you decide to complete a major revision, then be sure to explain how your change strengthens the original. After all, why would we want to change a deck to be weaker?

3. TEST IT! We want actual results – not theories and “probably-s!” You must have some results against Goblins with a splash, U/G/x Thresh with CounterTop, and a Landstill variant since those three decks are generally the best-performing decks for the time being. You should also test against at least one accepted combo deck; Belcher, Ichorid, Cephalid Breakfast, IggyPop, or TES, your pick, as long as you're not monkeying with MU percetages. Lastly, test against at least two other decks in the Legacy Decks to Beat forum or the Established Decks forum. See #6 of this section.

So for those of you who like lists, test against:

• Goblins
• U/G/x CounterTop Thresh
• Landstill (3 or 4 color)
• A Combo Deck (Belcher, Ichorid, Cephalid Breakfast, IggyPop, or TES)
• Two (2) other decks from the Decks to Beat Forum or the Established Decks Forum

4. Include and explain weaknesses that are inherent to your deck.

5. The deck may not have an existing thread that has started before December 1st, 2007. We made a few exceptions last contest based on certain circumstances. If you have questions. PM me.

6. The deck must be viable! It must be able to have a reasonable chance against other well known and competitive decks in this format. See #3 above.

7. Make your opening post look GOOD! It is a fact that well written, good looking opening posts get more attention and are taken more seriously than sloppy, poorly written posts.

Minor Rules and Notices
1. Don’t steal anyone else’s deck. I don’t expect to see anybody but Cavius posting a list for Nourishing Lich.
2. At the end of the contest, this forum will be deleted and all entries will be moved to the appropriate forum.
3. Here is a link explaining the rules for the latest release, Morningtide. In short, Morningtide will be legal - just make sure that the cards you are using are correctly spoiled.

Decks will be judged on the following qualities:

(Unfortunately some of this criteria is inherently subjective. No particular quality is more important than another. To illustrate, previous winners included Fakespam’s R/w Rifter build which was quite competitive and Spatula’s Ninja Survival deck that was rather unique.)

1. Originality. How new and original is the deck concept? How interesting is the deck or concept? It will be tough to score high in this category if you are revising a deck – unless your revisions are drastic.
2. Viability. How fast is the deck? What is its fundamental turn? Can the deck be considered competitive? How are its match-ups against the major archetypes? What card or deck makes it scoop?

Judges:
Please PM me before 12/25 if you wish to be a judge. I will likely restrict the judge selection to one judge per area unless we are sorely lacking judges. For information on judging, click here.

- Albany... ME!
- Syracuse...Lonelybaritone
- Rochester... Akki
- Germany... Lukas Preuss
- Connecticut... Kadaj
- Mass... Sanguine Voyeur
- South East USA - Tacosnape
- Site Staff - Di
- Italy - Greenone
- VA - AnwarA101


Really Important Note: To avoid conflicts of interest, judges cannot submit an entry for the contest.

To the participants: It is not reasonable to expect the judges to take every deck to the highest level of the judging process. It is simply an unfair demand of the judges' free time.

* By "definitely," we mean "we're pretty damn certain."

[Peter_Rotten]

Judges' Responsibilities

Really Important Note: To avoid conflicts of interest, judges cannot submit an entry for the contest.

Judges Responsibilities
Judges, you are expected to do the following or use a similarly tiered process for judging:

• Peruse as many submitted decks as possible. Follow as many threads as your free time allows
• Decide which of those decks deserve the most attention (which ones are the most viable and/or the most creative)
• Goldfish those decks a bit
• Play test those decks using whatever available means (MWS, Apprentice, actually building and playing the deck, etc.)
• At the end of the contest, PM to me a ranked list of your top 10 choices. I'll compile a master list of all the ranked decks and then a second round of voting will occur with the judges voting on the top 5 ranked decks.

How to Become a Judge

If interested in judging, then do the following: Please PM me before 12/25. I will likely restrict the judge selection to one judge per area unless we are sorely lacking judges. If you do not see your area listed and you want to be a judge, then feel free to PM me.

- Albany... ME!
- Syracuse...Lonelybaritone
- Rochester... Akki
- Germany... Lukas Preuss
- Connecticut... Kadaj
- Mass...Sanguine Voyeur
- South East USA - Tacosnape
- Site Staff - Di
- Italy - Greenone
- VA - Anwar101

- Other Areas?

[Peter_Rotten]

Prize Donations

It is through the kindness of our members that we are able to provide worthy prizes for contests like this one. I'll give an early "thank you" to any who wish to donate to the cause.

With that being said, we need a few rules for donating prizes to simplify the award process and to prevent any last minute revocation of donated prizes. (Yes, one year a member offered a prize and then refused to send it in after the winner was declared).

If you wish to donate a prize, please do the following:

• PM to me what you would like to offer as a donation
• I'll PM my address to you and list your prize under "Unofficial Donated Prizes"
• No prize listed in Unofficial Donated Prizes section is guaranteed until I have it in my physical possession. When I receive the donated prizes, then I will list them in the official Prize section.

[Peter_Rotten]

Morningtide or not?

A member asked a very good question about the contest:

Hi,

Will Morningtide be legal for the CaNGD? I've read no information about this.

Thx,

Maveric

After debating it with a few of the mods and adepts, I have decided that Morningtide WILL be legal for the contest. Spat may have put it best:

If we deny access to Morningtide, it just feels like an experiment, and not an actual attempt to innovate the format. In the actual format, Morningtide will be legal. If we want this to impact the actual format, Morningtide should be legal.

So here are the rules for using Morningtide:

• If you are using any Morningtide cards in your list, be sure that those cards are fully confirmed. Remeber the hub-bub when Ponder was an Instant?
• Any deck based around an incorrectly spoiled card will likely be disqualified.
• The Morningtide prerelease is 1/19. The most reliable information about those cards will be available after that date.
• Your deck does NOT need to have a single Morningtide card in it to be eligible for this contest.
• More Morningtide information can be found here.

[Peter_Rotten]

Special Thanks

I'd like to extend a special thanks to all of these people:

• The Adepts and Mods that helped bring this contest back
• Volunteers for Judges. Sorry if you volunteered and were not chosen; I've decided to limit the number of judges to 10.
• Members who have donated prizes.
• Any and all (soon-to-be) participants

[Peter_Rotten]

Updated Official Prizes.

[Peter_Rotten]

Updated prizes - those hot judge foils are now "Official."

[Peter_Rotten]

Updated prizes - Psi Blast is official.

[Peter_Rotten]

Updated prize pool -

4 Chalice of the Void (donated by Deep6er)
1 Engineered Explosives (donated by Deep6er)
1 Gemstone Mine (donated by Deep6er)

...have all become official.

We are officially awesome.

[Peter_Rotten]

And the winner is MossNought submitted by IOwn.

The other top contenders included the following decks:

TEC
BayouBilly
NQS
IWS (I Will Survive)
Ganganal Stompy (that's its new name!)
Karach

Thank you all for participating and an extra special thanks to the Judges and those of you who donated prizes! I truly think that this was our best CaNG yet. Plenty of the decks were suprisingly creative and I wonder if any will make a showing at a large event any time soon.

Over the next few days, I'll be closing this forum and filtering the CaNG decks into the N&D Forum.