Hello everyone!
I think that I've played the best game, and I'm here to tell you why. I've had a different road than Anthony and Jackson, and fairly unique to most games.
Premerge, I'll admit, I was fairly inactive. I showed up to a few challenges to help my tribes win, but I only went to tribal twice premerge. The first was on Princesa when Lilly went home. I was more active than her, and thus, she was an easy vote off. The second time was when Mike was voted out. When we lost that challenge, this was the point in the game where I knew that if I didn't light a fire under my butt, I would be gone sooner rather than later. I talked to my tribe members and the consensus seemed to be that Mike's challenge ability would be too much in the merge, and my inactivity was less of a concern. It ended up being a close vote, but I managed to stay.
We merged.
Immediately after the merge, I was a target for the second time in a row. I had my newly formed relationships from my previous tribe and also began talking to people I was never on a tribe with (namely Daulton). Using all of these connections, we got most people to vote off Jake, and this gave me a solid foundation going forward.
I went from having no allies to being allied with almost everyone in the game.
The second vote, I knew things were shifting, so I began talking to Nolan. From there, we formed a strong bond and we were able to take it far. I was hesitant to vote for Ryan, and Ryan almost convinced me not to vote for him in the revote, but I was looking out for myself. Ryan had voted for me before, so I knew he'd be more than willing to sacrifice me to get himself further, and that's why I had to vote for him. I was the swing vote for this tribal and held the power.
Also, I should note that Anthony had been feeding me information about what groups had tight alliances(ie final 4 deals), and I knew that my only shot at going far would be to systematically get rid of all of them, which is another reason I voted for Ryan.
The next vote was Stuart, which I didn't want to do, but again, I knew that in order for myself to have a chance to be here, I'd have to get rid of people who had tight alliances. The majority was voting for him, and I was already on shaky ground, so I didn't want to rock the boat.
Yes, it is true that Anthony was going around to get votes on Daulton the next round. However, he knew he could get votes for Nolan so he tried to switch it, but I talked to Nolan and ended up saying that we should do Daulton instead. I had connections with both, but Daulton had more friends which was more threatening, so he had to go.
From this point, I proposed a plan to Anthony to get us to the final 3 with Leo. We would first get Nolan and Leo to vote out Crypt (as he was one of the people I didn't talk to). Then, we would get Jackson to vote Nolan with us, and finally, we would get Leo to vote for Jackson (or he would self vote and it wouldn't matter). The plan was going well, until Leo got medically removed from the game, but we still made it to finals with Jackson.
I'm a little sad that Leo got removed, because my ideal final 3 was me, Jackson, and Leo. Honestly, if I had the chance, I knew Anthony would be a threat and I would have given him 4th, but this isn't the worst situation for me.
I had several key elements to my game that I think makes my game unique. The first is that I was never in any group alliances. If you look at what the other finalists say, there were a lot of group alliances, but none of them included me. I was on the outs and managed to make individual relationships to help me break through the larger alliances. I had a final 2 deal with Anthony and a final 2 deal with Jackson, and through these bonds, I got a lot of information to make my own decisions on who to vote out. What makes this particularly interesting is that I voted for the person who went home every single time I went to tribal council.
Another key to