Best Ice Cream Flavor

Every scoop in the case, and exactly one of them leaves with you. The rest are gone for good.

Ice cream makes a good bracket because the field genuinely has no centre. Vanilla is not a default so much as a deliberate position — a properly made vanilla bean is harder to hide behind than almost anything else on the list.

Mint chocolate chip is the most polarising flavour in the case by a wide margin, with almost nobody neutral about it. Pistachio and black sesame are doing something the chocolate-adjacent flavours cannot, which is tasting faintly savoury without ever stopping being dessert.

What you get is thirty-two flavours, and the question is what you would order every single time rather than what you would order once in order to be interesting.

There is a reliable pattern here: the adventurous choice wins the early rounds and the boring one wins the final. That is not voters losing their nerve. It is the difference between what sounds good written on a board and what you actually want in your hand on a warm afternoon.