Survivor New Zealand Nicaragua Edgic

This season is edited weird. The entire season is pretty dragged out, but maybe it would’ve been better watching it live. Why is redemption island here in the first season? That’s a very strange choice.

I think this season is fascinating. The strategy this season is so messy. Mike invites Nate to a final 4 alliance on like day 1 and then gets convinced to immediately kick him out and then the majority alliance so obviously had Barb and Nate on the bottom like they didn’t think a swap was possible. The orange tribe and especially Shay are not very smart in the premerge. For some reason they vote out Izzy who was sick for the first couple of days after Tom and Hannah who both were big assets imo.

Shay flips on all of her alliances for like no reason and then for the rest of the game gets labeled shady. Avi does his best gameplay of the season here by going from being on the bottom with Tom to kinda ditching him and almost leading the majority alliance (even though in confessionals he always says he’s protecting Tom) and then pretty much falls apart at the end. Tom plays most of the game very badly as he aligns with the wrong people especially at the merge and then is on the bottom and has to win immunities to stay. He does have good strategic moments, but had absolutely no control until like the final 6. I really like Shannon, but she was so wishy washy this entire game. She had strong points, but overall she plays it very messily with her being in the middle for half the game. I don’t know why the boys alliance of Mike, Lee, Jak, and Tom thought Shannon would flip to them because Avi was obviously never going to flip and it’s stupid for Shannon to force a tie. Barb also all of the sudden becomes a “mafia boss” when she directed one vote and then kinda gives up right after that. Like I think she played a good game, but I have no idea why she made those moves just to think that she’s not going to win anyways. Nate probably has did the least actively bad throughout the season, but has massive flaws in his game to where he couldn’t win. He does do some very good strategic work throughout the season, but just gives up many times and is just complacent where I think he could be a good player, but just doesn’t commit. Overall this cast is pretty bad at the game and I just wanted to talk about some of them.

The benefit of the season being so long is that this season has decently complex dynamics. I think everyone outside of Lee got good edits to where most of this cast is memorable even though a lot of them aren’t big characters. I think it’s a stupid decision for redemption to end at final 3 with 2 people coming back. Literally Michael spent the entire merge on redemption island. I’m honestly really surprised that Avi was a survivor fan because he played a very loyalty based game and didn’t vote out Tom.

Im honestly really happy Avi beat Tom and I’m annoyed for second guessing myself at the end because I ended up thinking it could be a how Avi lost season. For me it was a 50/50 with the edge to Tom because of all of the endgame comments saying Avi couldn’t win, but I guess those were just red herrings. I was really tempted to switch around Avi and Tom throughout the final episode, but wanted to stick true to myself so here we are. For most of the season Avi was #1 by default because he consistently got to explain himself when they very easily could have just ignored him because he’s not a very huge personality. I had the same thoughts with Shannon, but she was more high variance to me where she could go any time and I felt Avi had too good of an edit mid game. The reason I had Mike considered at episode 18 was because of my Avi doubts and Tom’s mediocre edit and it would be very funny for him to win though disappointing. It may look like it was obvious for the whole season, but to me it wasn’t. Anyways I consider this season for me a somewhat success as Avi was my #1 for a big majority of the season, but I failed at the last episode lmao