The first ever DeviantArt custom card contest is over!

Very special thanks to the founder of the "Islands of Faeria" DeviantArt community, RequiemsVoid, for running this special event.

Even though there can only be one winner by community votes for each category, we want to showcase even more of the submissions this week. Keep an eye out for another article from Aquablad for that.

We have to say that we severely understimated the number of submissions we would be getting for this contest - and that's a good thing! For any future contests we may be running, we'll be keeping this in mind and improving the contest in a few ways. We're happy that so many of you are excited about creating and sharing custom cards with others.

Remember, one of the major rules for this contest was:

Illustrations must be an original creation. No copyrighted material from a 3rd party.

This means if you used other artist's work in your cards, it wasn't eligible to win the contest. However, we do allow you to use and edit existing Faeria art if you so choose, as we always do for community events. It appears we need to somehow make this clearer for next time. We'll do that, if there is another.

Another important note is our decision to open voting a day early. This, unfortunately, was directly a result of the sheer volume of submissions being underestimated. There we over 200 by mid-week. We didn't believe people would have enough time to vote on all these submissions in less than 24 hours and still be able to show off the winners on the Monthly Cup stream, which was one of the goals. Anyway, we know this was a contentious decision and we'll make sure in the future to allow much more time for voting where this will never be necessary again.

All that said, this being the first contest of this type on DeviantArt, we're very pleased with the results. Now let's get into the fun part:

The Winners, by Community Vote

Multicolor and Pandora

• Magda's Round Table: By LyleDrake
• Yak Siege Tower: By vilius19991

Desert and Forest

• Dune Engine: By Nesachi
• Deep Root: By mauthanh

Lake and Mountain

• Shifting Yak: By Noaphiel
• Lava Moat: By DefactoFaeria

Note that we know there were a lot of cool illustrations in these categories that didn't quite get enough votes, we'll be showing these off later in the week.

Neutral

• Trojan Yak: By Saturas

And there you have it!

Thank you everyone for participating, we'll be contacting the winners and delivering them their prizes.

Each winner will receive:

• 2000 gold
• 1 Pandora Coin
• 1 Egg

The bottom of this post will be updated once the follow-up showcase articles are posted. There are a lot of neat ones we still want to show off, even if they didn't get the most votes. Remember, you can see all entries listed here.

Update: See the follow-up article here.

We hope everyone enjoyed this fun little contest designed to bring some activity to Faeria's DeviantArt community. We hope you'll be inspired to continue creating more cards and Faeria-related art in the future. If you'd like more, be sure to let us know.