Welcome readers, to another Fan Community Spotlight. This is a different installment than usual because we're not interviewing any creators, nor are we showing off a specific series of cards relegated to a card set. Instead, this article is a recap of the first season of our Weekly Card Design Competitions (or WCDC for short).
Season 1 of our WCDCs started on OoC back in February of this year, and the first season comes to a close now. With that, I thought it'd be nice to recap what happened during that season and look at all the past winners. The 20 table slots below represent all the winners and the cards they made that ended up giving them the victory of the main 20 competitions that took place.
1.01 - How To Train Year Dragon
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1.13 - Two Quests Are Better Than One
| 1.14 - By Your Powers Combined
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In addition to the 20 main comps though, we also had 2 side comps along the way. Party Planning 101 was held during the site's Birthday Bash week to celebrate the first anniversary of Out of Cards, and Written In The Cards was held to celebrate HearthCards reaching 10 million cards made.
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Highlights
Our First Winner
The very first competition surely won't be one to forget. It actually currently has the highest submission count of any competition to date, and Shivershine will forever go down in history as the winner of the first OoC WCDC, How to Train Year Dragon, with Cavern Explorer.
High Score!
MathU's winning card of Are You Prepared?, Felwing Hatchling currently has the highest score of any winning card to date with a score of 4.06. In fact, it is currently the only card submitted across every competition this season that finished with a score of 4.00 or higher.
Close Call
In By Your Powers Combined, we had the closest gap between the winning card (by LutriSpellcaster), and the runner-up (by Nirast), with a score difference of 0.012!
Linkblade's Domination
Linkblade91 is the biggest overall winner this season, with a whopping 4 victories under his belt, with 3 of them in the span of the first 12 competitions, winning in Demonic Obsession, Top Secret, Classically Trained, and Written In the Cards. Incidentally, all 4 of his winning cards happen to be Paladin cards. In addition, he also appeared in the finals in 15/22 competitions this season (68%), which is also the highest of any member.
Miscellaneous Observations & Stats
- Hunter was the only class without any winning cards in this season. In addition, there were also no Neutral cards that won a competition either if one doesn't count Mark of Dalaran, which is a Passive treasure and not necessarily used as a card.
- Meanwhile, Paladin is on the opposite end of the spectrum and has the most amount of winning cards out of any class, with 6.
Leaderboard
Linkblade91 - 4
Hordaki - 2
Shaveyou - 2
Conduit - 1
Demonxz95 - 1
DestroyerR - 1
Devizz - 1
KANSAS - 1
LesserHealer - 1
LutriSpellcaster - 1
MathU - 1
Shivershine - 1
Thepowrofcheese - 1
Tox - 1
Wailor - 1
Wassculaire - 1
Xarkkal - 1
While I'd say our first WCDC season went by quite swimmingly, we're all open to feedback on how make them even better. If you have a suggestion to improve the system, let us know in the comments below.
Comments
Some ideas I have had that I think would be nice improvements
1.) Site achievements for 2nd and maybe even 3rd place. Give some love to those people who get so close to winning. Doesn't need to be a fancy border, just something to recognize their achievement. 2nd place out of 40 submissions is still impressive.
2.) On the Competition Home page after a competition has been completed, I feel there needs to be a section that separates the finalists from the rest of the entries. Currently to see the finalist cards for a past competition, you have to open transparency report and find the cards in the Competition Entries.
The current layout of the Competition Home page is this:
I propose the layout be something like this:
This makes going back and seeing who the finalists were easier, and would showcase the 2nd place and 3rd place winners.
3.) Discussion Thread - can be overwhelming, and I feel there are some people who are afraid to post on there. It can get chaotic, and some people's cards can get a shit load of feedback, while others can get passed over or get very little. I don't have any ideas for improvements, and I really am not sure if there even could be a way to make any. Just throwing it out there as a thought.
I like that you highlighted that no Hunter card won. I honestly feel there were a few weeks that the only reason I lost was because of some (possibly in the sub-conscience) Hunter hate. And definitely some weeks where my Hunter cards should have made the finals at least. Makes me not want to make Hunter cards, which sucks because it's my favorite class and I really like designing cards for it.
As for Season 2, I am looking forward to the discussion on what improvements could be made. Don't get me wrong, the system that is already in place has some amazingly solid bones! There's just always room for improvements once everyone experiences and learns!
Thanks again to all the mods for an amazing season! I'm glad I was able to squeeze in a victory in the last couple of weeks. Maybe I'll practice making Paladin cards to prepare to take on linkblade next season! ;)
This is an interesting point to bring up.
I feel like there's rarely any hatred towards a WCDC card purely for the class, even if it's dominant in the current meta. That said, some people will have visceral reactions to various deck archetypes which will cause some negative opinions and lower scores on your card if it supports said archetype, whether or not the archetype is currently in its state of dominance as it has been. Although understandable, it's not necessarily always "fair", although there's not much that can be done about this.
Please note that there probably wouldn't have been a Demon Hunter card winning if there had not been the sixth competetion ("Are you prepared?") specifically asking for it. That actually provoked me into trying to do something with the class during the last competitions of season 1. Outcast is a cool mechanic, there sure are lots of things left to exploit here.
I enjoyed our competitions very much, even tho i wasnt as vocal lately, i still voted on every single card. You guys did a damn good job!
I'm still tilted by my loss in By Your Powers Combined. All I had to do was give my own card 5 stars, but nooooo, I had to to have manners and crap!
'Gratz to Lutri for that win.
Nice article! Please delete me from the leaderboard though, I haven't won anything (yet!) ;-)
First of all, I'd like to point out what I like most about the WCDC:
1) The community. Thanks again for all the support!
2) The mods. You are quick in response and fair in judgement. If you make a mistake, you admit it freely and you learn from them. I couldn't ask for more.
3) The voting page. Promoting new submissions to egalize the number of votes on each card is genious!
I think the improvements most asked for are well known to you, but I'll type out what comes to my mind nevertheless. Once again, big love for Flux or whoever added the preview tool on the submission page!
1) Finalists shouldn't be allowed to vote in the finalist voting. There were several competitions where people would have won if they had downvoted their opponents and who knows how many where that actually happened.
2) I would be very happy if the time schedule could be shifted to 2 hours earlier. I know that's a very selfish thing, but the new themes come out at 11 pm local time (CET) and at this time I'm either asleep or no longer creative. Maybe we could have a poll for this, as it's very dependend of where the majority of competitors lives. Before all else, it must be manageable for Shadows or whoever moderates the competitions though.
3) I would be open to try out a new voting system. The question of how to rate cards was quite frequently discussed throughout the season. Providing people with a frame would be the obvious solution, like using the current 5 star system to sperately rate things like Balance, Flavor, Art, Creativity and Abscence of mistakes for each card personally which then generates a calculated overall rating based on those categories. That would increase the "work" you'll have to do voting on cards by x5 and might result in less votes though, so maybe someone else has a better idea.
Entirely on me. (oops)
I think I had you listed when I thought you won a competition, but later turned out that you didn't.
Good thing Frosty came to the rescue to fix.
I'm surprised you didn't win this season. You'll get it next season for sure!
I'm going to respond to your improvements/suggestions for sake of discussion and to get the idea juices flowing.
1) I actually don't agree with this even though I used to. I think there is another solution to the finalist voting that will still allow the finalists to take part in the final voting process. (more on that in #3)
2) I think it would be interesting to hold a vote on a starting time. My only complaint about the current starting time is that I feel like I'm waiting forever on Monday's for the new week to start. It would be nice to have a new WCDC to help me procrastinate starting my work week on Monday morning's.
3) I think the voting system is perfect for the first round of voting. With how many submissions there are, asking people to do more than a simple 5 star rating would be too much. I try to give each card enough time, because I know the amount of effort that people put into their cards, and I want to give them the amount of time on their card that they deserve. But sadly, life is life, and we can't always have the time to do that. There were a couple of weeks that I had other things going on and I wasn't able to vote on every single card.
When it comes to the finalist voting however, I feel there is room for improvement. The 5 star rating doesn't feel right for how we are voting. Since all the cards are displayed for us to look at, we are rating the cards in a vacuum scoring it as so. Instead we are comparing the cards to each other and are choosing the one(s) we want to win, and the one(s) we don't want to win. Finalists vote their card 5 stars, and all others 1 star.
I propose instead of rating, we choose the order we think cards deserve to be in. This way, finalists would still be able to vote on their card choosing it to be #1. But they would be forced to choose a card to be #2, #3, #4, #5 and so on...Take the averages of how everyone ordered the cards and you will get the top order of all the finalists.
Just an idea which I'm sure has it's own set of flaws too. But it's here for discussion!
Thanks for your kind words and your thoughts on my ideas!
1) and 3): I second your idea, that sounds like a good solution.
2) I gave the vote for the starting time some more thought. If this should be done, the first step would be to ask Shadows what is possible for him. Everything else is secondary. After the vote, it would be important to compromise in my opinion. So let's say there are 20 people voting to start at 8 am and 30 people voting for 4 pm. The result of this vote should not necessarily be to vote at 4 pm, but maybe at 1 or 2 pm (find the middle ground and move into the direction of the winner).
Leaderboard (hopefully) fixed now. And thanks for the feedback!
ggwp, linkblade91 (:
I didn't set out to win with only Paladin cards; it just kind of turned out that way. Paladin isn't even my favorite class to play, although on some level it's the class I want to like the most, so maybe that's part of it. Making cards that appeal to me.
What?! I guess i was living in a lie all this time! Which is it then?:o
Mage...I think? I like clearing stuff with spells, but my favorite deck is Quest Taunt Warrior, so maybe it's the Warrior. I don't know >_<
I want the Paladin to be my favorite because the flavor connects with me, but the class has let me down a lot over the years.