Okay, sure. Status update. (Sorry for the voice of my post, I am feeling ... under the weather, shall we say?)
Firstly, this round would take a lot more effort to grade, and I knew it. There were three times as many cards, and exponentially more relationships and combos to consider when determining balance, as well as how those cards interacted to create some kind of interesting theme, which was generally my criterion for the creativity score.
Secondly, I really can't pull do what I had intended to do with only as few people as there are at this point. It wouldn't quite take redesigning the contest, but it would take a fair amount of work. I could just pull all five of you into a finals situation but I don't feel ready for that (and the next several challenges required pairs, which we don't have).
But thirdly, let's be honest, the whole experience was really very discouraging. I put a lot of thought and effort into the first few rounds, even though I made some mistakes along the way - and I did not get much of a strong response in return. By my count there are three, maybe four of you who really care all that much. I wouldn't have bothered with the contest in the first place of if only those four of you had actually signed up. But that's basically the situation I'm facing. It makes it pretty painful to continue.
Grading may not happen completely for a while. But I liked your entries. Some of them used some very creative mechanics, including Trainers played to the bench and forcing your opponent to devolve every time they look at your hand. Overall they were pretty well thought out, and now that I can examine Mewgar/Lostgar more closely, it's pretty easy to see what would and wouldn't work against it, even assuming it was extremely consistent as I expected.
Just to preemptively score, I would be thinking that the top three scores would probably be Pokemandan, Otaku and Scipio. But it's difficult to say for sure.