The Ultimate Allen & Ginter Mini Set Bracket: WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER!

We've finally reached the end of my Ultimate Allen & Ginter Mini Set Bracket contest!  It's been a long, long road but I've had a lot of fun and I hope you have as well.

We have a lot of results to get to, so let's not waste any time.

First of all, the grand prize winner!

Unfortunately, I'm not a paying member of Challonge so I can't actually see the email address of our winner.  Even worse, I don't have any way to verify who said person is since they didn't use any part of their user name within their bracket name.  That's a real bummer...unless you are the Lost Collector because I have to award the GRAND PRIZE to Lost Collector since that bracket can be verified.  Sorry to whoever put in the "tournaments are awesome" but there's nothing I can do about it if you don't give me some sort of information as to who you are!

So, a bit of a bummer that I had to do that but at least the Lost Collector's bracket was also a high scoring bracket (complete with the correct pick of our overall best set).

Speaking of overall best set, I'd be remiss if I didn't congratulate the 2008 Baseball Icons mini set as the BEST MINI SET from modern Allen & Ginter.  The readers have spoken.

I will admit, I like the Baseball Icons set a lot but I wouldn't call it the best set ever.  At least it did end up beating out the Ferocious Felines set in the finals by a narrow 8-7 margin.  In my opinion, the Ferocious Felines set probably isn't even a Top 30 A&G set, never mind it being the second best!

Still, that's the fun of the bracket - the results were all based on reader votes, not mine!  That being said, if it were based on my votes you would have seen the Flags of All Nations, National Animals, Man's Best Friend, and Baseball Icons in my top 4 (based on the way the bracket was assembled).  My finals would have pitted the Man's Best Friend up against the National Animals set with victory going to the National Animals.

Alas, my choices didn't make it but it was still a fun ride!

Now that we have the Lost Collector as our grand prize winner, there's still more winners to determine before we can get to the prizes.  

First up, a random commenter from the last update post on July 8 becomes a winner.  As usual, I'll use random.org and randomize the list 6 times with the top person winning (and repeat winners are possible as we've already seen).

Congratulations to P-Town Tom on his second win of the contest!  

The next post for which I selected to have a winner come from the commenters was the Final Four vote on July 15.  That ended up being a very popular post with 20 comments (not counting my own).  

Congratulations to the Diamond King for winning the 13th slot in the prize giveaway!

And finally, I had to take one commenter from the final vote (on July 17) to serve as our last winner for the contest.

Congratulations to John Sharp!

And with that, we have all of our winners!

Here's the full list of winners for the contest:

1. Lost Collector
2. Nick Vossbrink
3. Cardjunk (dayf)
4. Padrographs (Rod)
5. Trevor P.
6. Nick Vossbrink
7. Brett Alan
8. P-Town Tom
9. bbcardz
10. Alex Markle
11. Captain Canuck
12. P-Town Tom
13. Diamond King
14. John Sharp

Now, the fun part.  We need to take that list and randomize everyone to determine our prize picking order (remember, this is a prize draft)!  The only spot that was previously assigned was that the winner of the best bracket would be the Grand Prize winner which means that person gets first pick.  In this case, that means that the Lost Collector gets first pick.  In order to keep things as fair as possible, I'm going to enter all 14 names into random.org and then hit randomize over and over until Lost Collector comes back up in slot #1.  That will determine the order of our draft.

The above list is the order that everyone will make their picks.  More information on that at the bottom of this post!

Next up, the prizes!

Prize #1  Topps Lineage set

Prize #2  Jay Bruce A&G relic

Prize #3  Baseball Heroes A-Rod Green parallel

Prize #4  Topps Juan Rivera auto

Prize #5  Topps American Heritage Chrome lot

Prize #6  Topps Town set

Prize #7  Topps Fernando Rodney Camo parallel

Prize #8  Bowman Griffin Jax auto

Prize #9  Mysterious Figures framed parallel

Prize #10  Trevor May A&G auto

Prize #11  Donruss Jonathan Gray relic

Prize #12  Jimmie Foxx image variation

Prize #13  Lot of ~50 different Barry Larkin cards

Prize #14  Lot of 20 1993 Topps Gold parallels

Prize #15  (can be won by multiple people):  A PWE with a few cards of the team(s) of your choice.

Prize 15 is there simply for people who may not want any of the other prizes that I have in the contest.  At least in that way each winner will get something from his or her favorite team if nothing else!  I tried to have an eclectic selection of prizes to hopefully appeal to everyone but no hard feelings if you'd rather have a PWE of your team!

In order to facilitate a quicker, easier prize draft I am going to make use of a Google survey.  Each of the winners will need fill out the form (multiple winners will only need to fill the form out once but will need to select enough prizes up through at least their draft position).  Then, once I have all of the forms I'll start going down through the pick order sending off prizes (and thus crossing off selected prizes from future prize winners).  In that way, we should be able to get the entire draft done without a ton of posts from me trying to catch the attention of the person who's turn it happens to be to pick at that moment.  WINNERS:  PLEASE COMPLETE THE DRAFT FORM NO LATER THAN FRIDAY, JULY 24, 2020.  I hope to start packing up prizes this weekend!

Thanks to everyone who was part of the contest...either by entering a bracket, commenting/voting, or simply following along.  It was a lot of work to put together but the community response definitely made it worth while for me!