Before diving into the results of our recent “Make Priest Great Again” card design competition, we wanted to give a bit of a background on how the process of narrowing down the avalanche of entries worked. First, PC Gamer’s Tim Clark talks about narrowing the field, then Simon “Sottle” Welch explains how he went about picking the runners up and overall winner. On the next slide, see the first runner up with commentary from Sottle.

Tim: As Anduin would say: Wow! I can’t remember a response to a competition quite like this. Within the first 24 hours we’d received over 2,000 entries, and they kept coming, from all over the world, for the rest of the week. (Shout out to the incredible number of emails from Korea I got every night.) Many entries were accompanied by hundreds of words of text, and one person sent an album containing 100 card ideas. In the end it took three of us to distill them down to a list of several hundred for Sottle to look at. Thank you so much for all your effort. I hope Blizzard takes note, and even considers running some kind of community challenge of its own.

From the entries several key themes soon emerged. 1) People really want to experiment more with Shadowform. 2) They also actually want to make Silence Priest work somehow. 3) A ton of people would like a Tyrande Whisperwind legendary that allows overhealing and/or giving Anduin a health cap of 50. When picking the cards to send Sottle, we tried to avoid ideas Blizzard were unlikely to ever implement. So Priest weapons and Druid Choose One effects were frowned on, as was cheap card draw or insanely cheap AoE spells.

Also, a lot of the cards were very similar—I lost count of the number of versions of “Discover a Shadow Word card”—so, where that was the case, we kept the one with the most lucid text and best art. On the subject of art, we should have been clearer about using existing Blizzard stuff. So if you see an image you created that you’d like credited or replaced, please let me know and we’ll be happy to do so. Finally, respect to the person who just sent in Ragnaros, Lightlord with no changes. Now over to Sottle...

Sottle: Judging from the sheer volume of submissions, it seems apparent that many of you care deeply about making Priest great again. The weight of all the entries we received meant that I needed to enlist help to overcome the gargantuan task of sorting the pure from the tainted. Who better to join me on this journey of holy discovery than Torpedo Gaming’s Ness (Priest stalwart, Insomnia Truesilver winner) and Relapse Gaming’s TicTac (Rank 1 Legend finisher in the July Season).

Many entries were dumped in the discard pile immediately; the ludicrously overpowered board nukes, the comically overstatted minions, and the seemingly never ending supply of Purify memes, but other entries were also discarded due to few basic ground rules:

-Nothing that just dies to Fiery War Axe without having significant upside.

-Nothing that requires specific synergies to be at all useful.

-Purely reactive cards better be really damn good.

After much deliberation, we narrowed the list down to one winner and nine notable mentions that we have provided for your viewing pleasure.