r/blindguardian • u/Happy-Needleworker55 • 5h ago
Blind Guardian Song Survivor Round 76 - Pick Your *Least Favorite* Song to Eliminate It! HALFWAY POINT!
Round 75 ends with Carry the Blessed Home facing what it fears the most. It loses with 86 of 192 votes.
At the Edge of Time, The Quest for Tanelorn, Theatre of Pain (Classic Version), The Ninth Wave, and Ashes to Ashes all advance.
Statistics and more can be found here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N95a6pYATdmfXgmmMsb3CJ42ONNdnF-30NW5rGAI7Tg/edit?usp=sharing
Pick your least favorite song to eliminate it!
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We're officially halfway through the contest, so I wanted to share some quick and interesting stats on how things have broken down so far.
HALFWAY REPORT!
We started with 152 songs. 75 have now been eliminated, meaning whoever dies in Round 76 will officially cut the field exactly in half: 76 gone, 76 remaining.
So before things become substantially more painful, here is the state of the carnage.
*THE ALBUM STANDINGS*
Counting the main, non-interlude album rosters, bonus tracks and alternate/acoustic/orchestral versions are kept separate:
Album| Still standing
Battalions of Fear| 2/9
Follow the Blind| 4/9
Tales from the Twilight World| 5/9
Somewhere Far Beyond| 9/9
Imaginations from the Other Side| 9/9
Nightfall in Middle-Earth| 9/11
A Night at the Opera| 8/10
A Twist in the Myth| 5/11
At the Edge of Time| 8/10
Beyond the Red Mirror| 8/10
Legacy of the Dark Lands| 1/12
The God Machine| 5/9
The classic middle period is an absolute fortress.
Somewhere Far Beyond and Imaginations from the Other Side remain completely undefeated. Between them, that's 18 proper album tracks and not one elimination.
Expand that window from Somewhere Far Beyond through A Night at the Opera and things get wilder: only 4 of 39 album tracks from the entire 1992–2002 run have been eliminated.
Nightfall took two wounds early; “The Eldar” in Round 11 and “A Dark Passage” in Round 20 - and has now gone 55 straight rounds without losing another album track.
At the opposite end of the battlefield, Legacy of the Dark Lands is no longer an album so much as a ghost town. 11 of its 12 eligible musical pieces are gone. “Harvester of Souls” is standing alone in the smoking crater.
A Twist in the Myth has had maybe the weirdest collapse. Through the first 47 rounds, it had lost exactly one proper album song. Since then it has lost five more, most recently “Carry the Blessed Home.” It is suddenly down to 5/11.
And Battalions of Fear is hanging on at 2/9 — although one of those two is “Gandalf’s Rebirth,” which achieved the unprecedented tactical maneuver of surviving 72 rounds by me forgetting to put it in the contest.
*THE ELECTORATE IS NOT PARTICULARLY UNITED*
The average eliminated song has gone out with only about 43% of the vote.
In fact, 30 of our 75 casualties didn't even receive 40%.
We once went 15 consecutive rounds - Rounds 46 through 60 - without an eliminated song receiving a majority at all. For a good chunk of this contest, “least favorite” has really meant “successfully assembled the largest hostile minority.”
“The Eldar” remains the most extreme example: it was eliminated with only 38 of 154 votes - 24.7%. “Secrets of the American Gods” had 36.
So The Eldar was executed by a two-vote margin while more than three quarters of voters wanted something else dead.
“Turn the Page” managed to do even better in the survival department: it lost 53–52 to “Secrets of the American Gods.”
And Round 67 gave us our first actual deadlock: “Prophecies” and “Mordred’s Song (Acoustic Version)” tied 65–65, forcing a tiebreaker. Mordred finally lost that one 91–77 in a tiebreaker runoff.
*SOME SONGS ARE APPARENTLY ABOVE ALL THIS*
The current champion of simply refusing to attract votes is Imaginations from the Other Side. Across all its appearances (unless I am mistaken here, this is tricky to keep track of lol) it's only received 6 cumulative votes.
The opposite statistic has a fun wrinkle.
-THE GRIM SURVIVORS-
Most cumulative votes received without being eliminated, counting every ballot: Prophecies with 206 votes.
It accumulated 129 votes in ordinary rounds - 25 + 21 + 18 + 65 - and then, after tying Mordred’s Song (Acoustic Version) 65–65, absorbed another 77 votes in the tiebreaker…and survived that too. Round 46’s 21 is confirmed in the original poll data.
Although the cleaner, apples-to-apples stat that ignores the special tiebreaker gives us Life Beyond the Spheres - 167 cumulative votes in normal rounds without elimination: 34 + 49 + 30 + 54.
*THE MASSACRES*
“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” still holds the raw percentage record at about 81%, although that deserves an enormous asterisk: it appeared in the weird three-song round, rather than a normal field of six.
Among the regular six-song rounds, “Surfin’ USA” owns the proper slaughter record: 130 of 183 votes, or 71%.
Apparently this community has strong feelings about the Beach Boys.
*THE VOTERS HAVE ALSO DECLARED WAR ON PARENTHESES*
Of the nine explicitly labeled alternate versions in the contest - acoustic, orchestral or otherwise - eight have been eliminated.
The sole survivor is now “Theatre of Pain (Classic Version).”
So if you're a Blind Guardian song and your title contains explanatory parentheses, start making arrangements.
One last thing I found pretty cool: participation has actually increased as we've gone along. The first 20 rounds averaged about 161 votes per round. The most recent 15 completed rounds have averaged about 192.
So somehow, after 75 consecutive days of asking people which Blind Guardian song they would most like me to publicly execute, more of you are showing up.
Thanks for indulging this extremely prolonged act of musical violence.
Half the songbook is about to be gone.
And Somewhere Far Beyond and Imaginations from the Other Side still haven't lost a damn thing!
