And this is what happened to some extent. I'm not sure if all the crazy stuff that got nerfed or removed would have been found without those prizes. Examples include first versions of Woven Shadows, Nightmares, Cathedral of Xosa, AGS, Evangelist of Deeds, Greck & Egg and so on. People really put thought and effort into building broken decks. But the number of testers was too low and even worse was the lack of forum activity.

Hmmm... I do see a point in it encouraging finding broken combos but it dosnt encourage reporting them.

Loosing to broken combo encourage to report it

Exactly. I bet the forum activity would have been even worse without the entry fees / prizes. Or perhaps there would have been a bit more discussion, but the quality would have been much worse also because now it was only the better players being involved. People - includind myself - whined a lot about anything they thought was OP because it was annoying to lose money to some nearly unbeatable deck.

Yeah, im starting to see the light. I feel like a jerk for making the thread.