Last-minute inspiration has stuck. Second submission iincoming!
Soooo wanted to participate, but my ideas didn't fit the theme and time was not on my side. I'll have to hope there will be another opportunity. 
Best of luck, everyone. I played against someone's submission tonight, and I have to say I was highly entertained! 
My friends and I considered how funny it would be if someone spent weeks coming up with ideas, putting together the perfect villain deck, playtesting it and getting everything just right, creating a masterpiece of gameplay, but then submitted it with the most absurd villain character anyone could possibly think of, just to give >G a hard dilemma, so they'd say "This deck is perfect, but the villain is ridiculous! What do we do?!"
But no one has that kind of time.
That sounds like a whole lot of extra work for this contest, IMO. I certainly didn't come up with each card in the deck and playtest and make it perfect before I sent in my email. I figure that's what the game designers will do. I gave an overview of what the villain is about and more importantly, how it would feel and how it would fit into the world. Then I gave examples of types of cards the villain would have (no gameplay details), and included my idea for the flip mechanic, since I figure that having a unique flip mechanic is a vital requirement for any new villain. But I definitely didn't try to hand them a 100% complete deck.
Guess we'll see if I completely misjudged the contest. ;)
I did about the same as Spiff did. Now I just want the contest to hurry up and be over with, so I can find out that I won't win sooner, heheh.
Now that I got to read all the new villains, I completely scrapped one (I'll post more about it after the 29th) and I'm working on my other submission. I might try to whip out a second villain if something really good comes to mind.
But yeah, I'm not balancing... I would like to make mine as short as possible but out of enthusiam it will be at least a page.
I went in completely the other direction. My entries included complete decks, descriptons of the art on each card, quotes for each card, backgrond, difficulty rating, the whole works. The only thing I left out, apart from the kitchen sink, was actual artwork because I can't draw for toffee. I figured give >G everything there is in your idea so they can see why it's so awesome they have to make it win. But I agree with theJayMann and want the results now so I can know rather than just suspect I didn't win.
Well, I do have one bonus point. Not only did I provide an illustration of the villian, that illustration was created by Adam himself.
that illustration was created by Adam himself.
No fair! You should disqualify yourself immediately. ;)
Unless that image is of Hippoman… then I demand that it wins!
I'm about to send my two submissions as five-page PDFs with a general explanation, profile similar to the what >G has created for each character on the website, and a full play-test deck for each.
I play-tested pretty extensively for one of my submissions and it now has most of its kinks worked out. Getting the mechanics to match the theme was a game in and of itself, and I had a tremendous time tweaking it at my kitchen table with my Enhanced Edition all week.
The other was a snap creation following a particularly inspired commute to work. It has not been play-tested at all, though I think it has a lot of promise. Regardless of the outcome of the contest, I look forward to poking holes in it.
I'm as excited to see everyone else's ideas as I am the results of the contest. Come October there's going to be a whole lot more villains running around the Multiverse. It was so cool of >G to run such a thing - not many companies are so supportive of the creativity of their customers (or should I say fanbase?).
I think they're expecting they'll get a variety of levels of submissions - from a high-level summary to full decks. I don't think any of these are right or wrong (in fact, I think the >G folks are going to appreciate the variety on this 
).
The person I know whose villain we play tested is an actual game designer (actually has a published game and everything), so he's not the norm.
I'm really looking forward to the "Original Villain" thread that comes after this is over... Maybe they could even eventually publish more than one villain as stand alone $5 decks.
I almost dont want to submit a second villain because I'm so happy with my first... lets just say every game his flip effect is different and should produce a "holy #$%&" moment.
This
I went ahead and made a detailed backstory, and every card in the villain deck, which my friends and I playtested a few times. But I didn't go beyond that, so I guess I fall into the middle ground of effort. I suppose I could go through and make quotes for every card and make descriptions for all the artwork...
Oh wait, no I couldn't. That would require more creativity than I have. Kudos for the effort, Pwatson.
Heh. Thanks, but it wasn't effort, it was fun!
My first submission was the full works - Background, Character description, flip mechanic, deck theme, card effects, quotes, art description. No original art, cause I can't draw, but I lifted some images from a google search for illustrative purposes. I even put together an outline of a six-comic arc where the quotes come from and the villain makes their first appearance. Then I went overboard and wrote notes about the thoughts underlying the theme and mechanics, how I came up with the idea, etc.
My second submission I'm putting the finishing touches on now, but it's not as well developed. The idea for the character and some really new mechanics are there, and I've written out a deck which probably needs a lot of work, and is more a collection of ideas. I don't have as firm an idea of the villain's story and what happens in the battle as my first one, so any quotes and such that I have are more placeholders.
Im really looking forward to seeing everyone else's heroes once the winner has been announced. There has to be some crazy ideas out there!
Remembered a character who I created a long time ago, I came up with a couple of new card types and yeah... I think I will go for the gold and submit one more depending on how busy things are at work today. It will be another "zero numbers" submission because as I said in my butt kissing email with the first submission: I trust you guys with game design.
No, really, it's awesome that you guys did all this. Actually, I was thinking about adding a lot of notes about how I came up with the ideas and everything, but I didn't because I thought there'd be so many submissions for them to go through, all those notes would be annoying. I didn't want my entry to be a bore to read. But it's too late now, I already submitted my entry. What's done is done.
Either way, how are we gonna do all this sharing? I guess here on the general discussion board? It'd probably be way more organized to have everyone make separate topics so we could share individual feedback. But my main thought was when does everyone want to start posting? The contest ends tonight, right? I'd be cool with posting mine after midnight/tomorrow since the entry period will be done, but if everyone else was gonna wait until after the results, I don't wanna jump the gun.
Technically, the contest ends tomorrow night. Any e-mail date stamped as sent on or before the 28th is a valid entry.
It's going to take me a couple weeks to sort through them all. I want to read and consider and really work through each and every one in depth, and there are just under a hundred of them. And more coming in as I type this.