The votes have been tallied, Florida required a recount, and the decision is final. The winners, as voted on by you the members are:
Soaring to Victory by rotru
Alert the Suicide Squad By Ultimate_X-Men
Smoke and Mirrors by doc23

Those three members should email [email protected] with there addresses so that we can send them 4 DC HeroClix: Unleashed boosters each!
The May-June contest starts today, so start submitting! Rules can be found here - http://www.hcrealms.com/forum/showth...threadid=83675

Remember, articles can be in any of the following subjects: strategy, unit analysis, team analysis or ability analysis. So please limit yourselves to those subjects!

I like the Smoke and Mirrors one, but it has a mistake. It states that you can't put a smokecloud on a figure. You can in fact put it over a figure. Good strategies though

congrats, everyone!

I'd like to thank everyone who voted for my article, and special thanks go out to those who voted favorably for it even though I neglected to mention that playing on an indoor map makes all of my tips totally worthless.

Also, congratulations to the other winners as well.

Congrats from here as well- those were all great articles.

Congrats also to the judges for relaxing the universe-crossing criteria.

I liked Smoke and Mirrors, but I'll admit that it mixed DC (people listed as doing Smoke Clouds), Marvel (suggests using Smoke Cloud to interefere with Nightcrawler and Ulik), and Indy (Shi). All the same, it would've been a shame to disqualify it as you could take out the universe crossing fairly easily and still have essentially the same article- in effect, we'd just be penalizing him for being so thorough.

For that matter, the universe-crossing in Soaring to Victory was even more minor, simply mentioning Galactus and the Sentinel in a DC discussion of the Soaring rules, and only for the sake of fully defining the power.

I originally thought that the two authors would be out of luck on the technicality, their work wasted due to innocent mistakes. Thank you for proving me wrong. It's good to see that the judges didn't kick them out automatically!

Ouch! That didn't even occur to me as I was writing it. I knew my strategy would be DC only, but I guess I got a little carried away with completeness in describing the powers and weaknesses of soaring.

Thanks for the kind words, Sonya, and thanks for not disqualifying me, judges.

You're welcome- it really was a great article. I think that we're all used to thinking tri-universally and it's hard to shake it. I know that I usually catch some sort of universe crossing when I review my articles for the first time. I was actually worried that I would be disqualified for using the word "lackey" in a Marvel article this month! (Luckily, it quickly dropped low enough in the lists that I didn't have to worry.. )

I imagine that the delay this month might very well reflected Draddog (or whoever judges it) reversing an earlier decision to correct for harmless error and give you guys the prize you deserved. I mean, it's not like universe crossing had anything to do with the point of either article.

Anyway, congrats on the win and repeated kudos to the judges for compassionate judging (on behalf of all the other authors who worry about making little slips in the future).

Congrats all. I've said before that rotru's article was a great example of highlighting some aspect of this game in a new way, and therefore quite deserving of top spot.

I never noticed the cross-universe stuff, and either the contest judges also missed it or decided it didn't impact on the information enough. That's a little annoying. I've had to eliminate some great material from my articles to avoid that problem, or had to word something vaguely (like referring to BatsAlly as a "TA that acts like Stealth"). So essentially I was penalized for following the rules explicitly. How annoying. Now there's a blurry line, and there's no way of knowing just how much cross-universe discussion is permissible. (Full disclosure: I came in fifth, so if the two "offending" articles were disqualified, I'd make the winners circle.)

Oh, well. At least not winning is an excuse for me to continue writing. I made top ten first time, top five this time. Third time's the charm? Or should I wait until the prize is something other than Unleashed?

Congrats to the winners, though. I think there were a lot of well done articles this month, even more than last month, so coming out on top of that list should be extra gratifying.

TheSpirit- Until they start automatically including links to discuss each article in the article section (hint to any mods! All right.. so I've already put it in the suggestions pile a while back..), this seems like as good a place to say this as any:

While many of the articles had an interesting point to convey and conveyed it well, yours was by far the best reading experience of the bunch. It's hard to pull off the "eaves-dropping on a conversation" approach and have the conversation sound both genuine and interesting, and you managed to do it very well. Whatever you do for your future entries, here's one vote for hearing it from the Ancient One! The device made the material much more approachable than it could've been, resulting in a light, easy read. (Granted, approachability is one of my pet problems, so I might be a bit sensitive to it.)

Anyway, well done! Even if you don't get third, I'd at least award you fellowship!

Congratulations to all the winners. Thank you to everyone who voted for my article.

rotru and doc23 articles wrote great articles.

Best of luck to everyone in the next competition.

I'm just going to stop you right there and say YES! Please mods, do this. Having a way to comment on the articles would be a great help. I've wanted to comment on many of the articles, sometimes just to congradulate the writer, but at times to point out some minor problem or mistake in them. There have been incorrect rules interpretations made in some of them (and I'm not putting myself above that), and it would be helpful if those could be pointed out.

Well gawsh! That's nice of you. Oddly enough, I am a professional writer in real life. And yes, I'm planning a return visit to the Ancient One, if I can get off my duff to do it. Thanks for the compliments. They're much appreciated, especially since you've done some fine writing here yourself (and you're not the only 'Heads fan, either). I trust you're working on something yourself for this month?

I still don't understand why an aricile cannot address "mixed" universes in reference to the sanctioned Open Universe format.

Not to be a jerk, but I just want to point out a few problems with Ultimate_X-Men's "Alert the Suicide Squad" article... First, the one strategy about MC'ing a fig to move next to a SS team member and push themself to death doesn't work b/c MC actions are free actions and won't cause a figure to take push damage. Second, the probability chart for healing made no sense to me at all. It should be more like

Receive 1 healing click 3/6 (roll of 1,2, or 3) 50%
Receive 2 healing clicks 1/6 (roll of 4) 16.7%
Receive 3 healing clicks 1/6 (roll of 5) 16.7%
Receive 4 healing clicks 1/6 (roll of 6) 16.7%

I guess maybe if you change the wording in the original chart to say "Receiving X or more healing clicks..." then the probablities would be accurate. I am just a stickler for probablities I guess and had to say something.

Other than that I enjoyed all 3 articles. Keep up the good work fellow HCRealmsers...

TheSpirit-

I'm glad that you like the idea of automatic "Discuss this article" threads. I was able to work out something kind of like it by starting a discussion thread for my article and including a link to it in the description, but it's a clunky work-around and doesn't help you comment on articles when people haven't started threads.

Thanks also for getting the Mr. Jones reference! It's still one of my favorite Talking Heads songs.

I'm planning on whipping another article into shape this month. I did Fear for April as part one of four, so I feel somewhat committed to finish Ignorance up for May (despite the rather poor showing of part one). I've got the basic article done, I just walked away from it a few weeks back when I found myself unable to give it the "zing" to make it a page-turner. Here's wishing that I had your knack for it! Ah well, back to the word mines..

Gentlegamer- I assume that part of the problem is that the winning articles are destined to eventually go onto one of the three Heroclix sites and they don't have a fully functional Open Clix site. So until then they have to have Marvel articles for the Marvel site, DC articles for the DC site, and Indy articles for Indy site. Of course, I haven't checked to see if that's actually how they're doing it, but I assume that'd be the theory. It's how they used to do it in the old "submit an article for Volunteer points" days.

I think this is the right answer. Last month's winners all mentioned Marvel, and all three are only linked on the WK Marvel page. Guess they'll have to do a little editing on the two winners this month who broke the rule.