Congratulations to both contestants for finishing this round with some amazing builds! You all should be very proud no matter what the outcome is! Few people in the world know what it is like to build in and survive an Iron Builder round, but here you are! You did it!

I like to think of Build Quality as what the builder did to wow me with their builds. I thought Dan had the better NPU this round, with several of my favorites being the "Hobby Time" toolset, the entirety of "Jack of all trades" and the Powerpuff girl from "Can't burst my Bubbles". Both contestants in this round had highs and lows to their presentation skills. Overall, I consider presentation a tie. Dan and Josiah had some nice edits and both had some obviously rushed photos as well, with neither being the clear loser or forerunner.. In the end though, it is the scale of Josiah's builds that makes up for, and overcomes Dan's superior NPU! Josiah had several massive and yet heavily detailed builds like "Ghost Ship, The Flying Dutchman", "The Pale Horseman", and of course the giant "Premonition: Nile Frogs".

One helpful way to look at Seed Part Usage is not only to look at who had the best uses of the seed part, in terms of NPU, but to also think about which contestant used the seed part the worst. To me, it is the best average between the two that shows true mastery of a seed part. I want to see the seed part used tons, but I also want to see it used in ways that make sense! The person who had the most nice seed part usages in this round was Dan. I really liked the uses in "All hands on deck!" and "Care for a slice?", though my favorite was the feet of the caterpillar in "The Hunt Is On" (This was also the best use of the friction pin in the entire round). Josiah had is own amazing uses as well, in "Who'll laugh last... ?" and "Chinese Sun Dragon", but it was also Josiah that I felt had the most forced uses in the round. Josiah's ship had green canons, and his skull had green teeth, which, although the shape works well for both, to me the green is out of place. I felt that all of Dan's uses made more sense than these did - even when Dan forced a usage, the color still worked.

Performance was the hardest category for me to judge. This feels to me like I have to make an overall gut decision on who gets this one, but I will do my best to give some concrete reasons: The biggest one is that I think Dan’s seed part usage more than makes up for his lack of scale. I really like what Josiah did to go big while still building fast, but I think that at times it didn’t interest me as much as Dan’s small but clever builds. Other small factors were puns and response builds. I think that puns were close to even, but Dan was the only person to have a response build (“No, Deere”)! It had me actually laughing when he posted it! The final nail in the coffin for me was the idea that when Dan built a character from something, it was instantly recognizable. The powerful girl was perfect, and even though Baby Yoda was a pretty simple build, I still instantly knew that I was looking at Grogu. Josiah’s character build, Moana, at first seemed like a generic islander, and only realized it was supposed to be Moana once I read the title. It is all these ideas that lead me to thinking that Dan had superior presentation skills in this competition.

That was a lot, but congratulations to both contestants once again for putting on a great show!

Whew! What a round!

Both contestants did an amazing job at keeping us entertained. It felt like we were getting new builds almost every day! While tough to judge I did my best to summarize my reasoning for each category decision:

Parts Usage:
Jordan really leaned into his well-formed style and used the seedpart in some of the most creative ways. My favorites were: the use of color and shape for the Ninja Turtle. Taking advantage of texture and shape in the pirate and parrot (especially the head of the parrot). And in my opinion the best use in the whole round: The caterpillar legs. Jordan’s consistent innovation with the seedpart in ways that actually worked for the whole of each moc won him this category.
Josiah’s builds in many ways felt like there was effort made to incorporate the seedpart with clever connections which was ultimately favored over cohesiveness within each model. While a few builds stood out for using the seedpart’s unique shape (X-wing, Frog eyes, Halo helmet) most uses felt forced, or completely unnecessary. Many of the uses could have been easily replaced with different parts for better results. This was not only the case with shapes but also with color, where often the bright green felt awkwardly, if not jarringly, included in a build.

Build Quality:
Jordan undoubtably has a skill when it comes to using parts. While his builds tend to be on the smaller side, each one is packed full of detail because he uses each part with precision and purpose. Although Jordan’s builds themselves were good, his presentation is what really took him down in this category. An extra day spent creating a better background or composition would have gone a long way. For example, imagine his excellent caterpillar was crawling along a branch in a rich but tasteful garden scaled in a way to really show off the subject. Also, things like using a baseplate as background feel plain lazy.
Josiah’s build quality was quite a concern for me at the start of the round, but after he found his groove, we saw the showing we had been expecting. Josiah has a build style that is instantly recognizable. It is a sloppy sort of genius that incorporates all manner of clever parts and colors to show of a main idea or subject. Builds like The Pale Horseman, and especially the Flying Dutchman really show off use of scale and story while still feeling like a complete whole. The hieroglyphs on the Nile Frogs build as well as the (sadly blurry) micro Egyptian city behind are the signs of a builder who is willing to go above and simply for the elevation of an entire build. Overall, Josiah won this category in my book.

Performance:
Jordan stuck to his own style the entire length of the round and consistently innovated from his first build to his last. He ranged in subject, scale and story while constantly keeping it fresh. After reviewing the round as a whole, Jordan proved his diversity in skill, and while not perfect, he had the best performance.
Josiah had a solid start with a bust of Joker (which is technically quite impressive for a competition like this) but then sort of drifted into a slow burn faze seemingly matching Jordan’s style of builds before waking up at the very end and posting some absolute bangers. Obviously, I understand that the larger builds take longer depending upon a variety of factors, but what concerned me most with Josiah’s performance was his seeming laps out of his own style. It felt very out of character to see several “throw away” builds (trinity test, lion’s mane, etc) especially having just seen him excel in the Forge. I’m no sure if he was being thrown for a loop by the bright green, or simply trying to mirror Jordan for a more back and forth sparring match. Either way it ended up hurting his performance as we saw a decline in consistency and style. Thankfully Josiah had secretly been working on some awesome builds we did end up seeing which made this round much, much closer than first anticipated.

You both are fantastic builders, and no matter the final results I hope that you keep building and creating amazing things! Cheers!
-Eli Willsea

"This round has perhaps, in my opinion, one of the most intriguing seed parts so far in this year’s Iron Builder. The Large Minifigure Hands has a very specific shape that hardly resembles any pattern/texture in real life objects, its size and connection point also pose some further challenges for builders to utilize it, not to mention its asymmetric nature.

For parts usage, I would like to hand it to Jordan. Jordan’s first build in the round with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle has instantly become one of the most impressive and memorable Iron Builder entry for me. The way that the hands are used literally throughout the turtle’s body, head to leg, was truly an achievement and a great display of the Iron Builder spirit. On top of that, the rest of his entries also showed a more diverse usage of different “parts” of the element: for instance, the underside of the fists to create the owl face, the “fingers” as texture of a cushion; even in cases where Jordan and Josiah are using the same part of the element, e.g. the technic pin connector for the legs of Jordan’s caterpillar and the cannons on Josiah’s Flying Dutchman, Jordan came just slightly on top for truly embracing the element by also using the hands themselves as the caterpillar’s body.

For Build Quality, I would once again hand it to Jordan. Both builders have created some very high-quality models during the round, with pleasingly clean presentation that I enjoyed. However, looking into the details, I think Jordan’s models earn that extra point from me with all his clever part usage outside the seed part, e.g. slingshot for a microscale horse and large brick separator for Aku’s body. Josiah’s entries, while still being impressively detailed with some really cool shaping, seem to rely on more of the traditional ways of brick-building for the most part.

Last but not least, for the overall performance, I think Jordan simply took this round. I don’t think there is a clear winner regarding the puns and reparteé, so the decision comes down to the models again. Both of you have created entries with such a wide range of topics in this round, but in the end of the day, I think Jordan managed to incorporate the seed parts more naturally in most of his entries, while in quite a number of Josiah’s entries, the hands still very much stand out and can be recognized right away as an Iron Builder entry. As always, kudos to both builders once again and I can’t wait to see more awesome builds from you guys in the future!