While I am grateful for & absolutely LOVE the the SNCs, there are over 700 responses to the thread Saturday Night Contest-What You Think here at T11. Why not use some of those ideas? The Lotto idea I feel has been used a lot, and just like tricks, shouldn't really be repeated too often, especially for the same audience. For that reason I don't enter the Lotto SNCs. Just my rant but I think better ideas would push creativity and create more community, and that what magic is all about.
Totally hear where you're coming from and completely understand! The reality is that while some of those contest ideas sound fun, the amount of participation that would take place for those would not be that great, especially the more specific you get. While we use the random lotto idea frequently, it's the contest that yields the most entries and most people can enter. Anything that has to do with a video submission, even with over 24 hours of time to enter, yields very few submissions compared to the amount in the past, and I have to be honest it's a little bit discouraging for us to continue those contests when there are only 5 entries in the pool. There's a whole conversation to be had about the more effort people need to put in, the entry amounts go significantly down. If there are only a handful of people entering, the bar of expectation doesn't really move compared to if you had 20 people entering at once.
We would love to do fun and challenging contests like the one last week where you have to really think outside the box, but as you saw we had a very small number of people enter, which makes me a little bit sad as I want to see as many different effects and presentations as possible, because that is what makes competitions fun! We're always looking for new things to do for these contests, but we also want as many people to have a chance to win as possible. It's a tough line to balance, and we want all of you to have fun in the end.