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Merge episode, time to pick ...

I haven't had time to participate much this season, and I haven't read all the posts. But it looks like folks are jumping off the Mick bandwagon because of his UTR merge episode.

To me, there is edgic, and then there is quasi-edgic. I consider almost all the made-up "rules" to be quasi-edgic. Rules like:

• Any player who ever gets rated INV by the site-voters cannot win.
• The winner has to get special treatment in the first 15 minutes of the first episode.
• The winner gets CP editing only after the merge.
• The winner has to be CP in the merge episode.

There are more, but I find them tiresome even to list. Because to me, edgic is fairly simple and requires no "rules" at all. KQ's guidelines are more than enough. Here they are:

Things we have learned through Edgic:
1) The winner may have ups and downs, but is typically not hidden or way over the top.
2) Over the course of the game the winner is closer to middle of the road.
3) The tribe that has the most complex dynamics and strategy almost always contains the winner.
4) The ending is always set up to be a somewhat of a 'surprise'. You either don't expect the winner or second place to be there.
5) People who are OTTN for long don't last.
6) People who are OTTP for long usually last, but don't win.
7) If two people are a 'known final pair' then the likelihood of them actually being the final two is almost zero.

The concept is easy, but applying it is tricky.

But one of the chinks in edgic's armor has been its slant in favor of CP editing. It works fine when the winner gets CP editing, but that doesn't always happen. And so for awhile, especially after S11, we talked about how to identify non-CP winners. During S14 I wrote, "UTR winners remain the nut that edgic has never cracked." And I posited the following guidelines that might apply:

• While a CP winner can be N, a UTR winner cannot: a UTR winner must be either P or neutral (more likely P).
• Because, by definition, a UTR winner is not front and center, a UTR winner is likely to be surrounded by even more distraction than a CP winner is. This "extra" distraction takes the form of true-CP characters like Kathy and Rob M, or, more likely, faux-CP characters like Paschal, Jenna L, Gary, and Coby. (Meaningful editing is the factor that separates true CPs from faux CPs.)
• Although a UTR winner is not front and center, s/he is a constant presence throughout the game--even if only shown smiling in the background.
• A female winner is more likely to be edited UTR than a male winner is. That's partly because women are more experienced at playing UTR in real life.

In subsequent seasons, the quest for the UTR winner actually led some too far in that direction. In S15, flf wrote:

Todd may be as wallduck asserts, ie., the obvious winner that Edgic feels is too Edgically obvious to win. I hope not, because the search for a UTR winner is so much more fun!

Sorry for the history, but it leads to my point: There clearly is no viable CP candidate in S19, which suggests that the winner is getting UTRP editing. And Mick certainly fills the bill.

Winner: Mick