Pwnisher gave 1,700 3D artists from 101 countries the same five-second trading-card template and one rule — no generative AI — then cut what came back, by the video’s own count sixteen years of collective work, into a single reel that runs two hours, fourteen minutes.
Clinton Jones — pwnisher to 1.4 million YouTube subscribers — ran this as the 13th in a series of recurring community 3D challenges: sign-ups opened August 1, 2026, submissions on August 14, deadline August 31. Every artist animated against the same constraints: 120 frames at 24 fps, five seconds, rendered vertically at 1080×1920 or 2160×3840, camera locked in place except for motion blur, depth of field, and a permitted subtle shake, with the character required to stay in focus and the card’s text overlay legible over it. A six-person panel judged the results, including Magic: The Gathering illustrator Dominik Mayer and Horizon Forbidden West concept artist Calder Moore; the top five submissions won motion-capture and software packages, and the top 100 each got software licenses, asset packs, and a physical print of their own card.
The no-AI rule is specific by name — it bars image-to-image, text-to-image, text-to-video, AI render engines, upscalers, and ComfyUI workflows outright — but the challenge’s own rules page describes enforcement as a submission-form “file checker,” which verifies frame count, resolution, and codec, not the presence of AI. The rule runs on trust inside a community with reputations at stake, not on anything that could catch a well-disguised pass.
The finished reel runs 2:14:29 by its own file metadata, cut into 34 chapters named for card abilities rather than ordered alphabetically or by submission, with a linked Google Sheet crediting every one of the 1,700 artists and their country against a timestamp. The community turned the results into a browser card game at play.gauntletofgods.com — free, no sign-up, designed by judge AJ Brandon with a dozen credited playtesters — though the site still flags its own build as “not final.”
A physical 100-card deck is up for pre-order directly through Creo Cards: $25, every box identical (no random packs), plus a rulebook and a token punchboard, pre-orders open through September 26, 2026, with an estimated May 2027 ship date to more than 50 countries. Per both the challenge’s own page and Creo Cards’ listing, all profits go to UNESCO’s International Fund for Cultural Diversity.