Off the back of a pretty even Staff Pick-MSA winner split in 2022 in terms of my own first choice albums, this is probably one of the most unbalanced cases of the Staff Picks aligning with my tastes more than the MSA winners - there's 10 of my personal favourites here vs. 2 in the MSAs (I also can't separate Hypno5e and TesseracT, so I'll say it's 10.5-2.5), plus me also getting a Staff Pick in CCs. Curiously enough, the only time where I found myself favouriting the 'big name runs away with it' MSA winner is Insomnium, whose win was met with a lot of disappointment in the results thread (which I can understand, as Moonlight Sorcery, Kalmah and Pronostic in particular were also all excellent albums).

I'm just happy that Tailgunner got the staff pick for heavy metal as it was my AOTY without competition. I was really disappointed to see it finish second to last (not counting the very strange 17 write-in votes for Metallica. Heavy metal? Seriously?) but it got the vindication it deserved here instead.

Now these are results I can agree with.

"2022 Metal Storm Staff Picks"

It should be 2023.

or I should be missing something.

Idk, maybe I am just wrong but I thought the Tailgunner album was really boring.

This is really damn close to my picks. The ones that weren’t picked here were usually my second choice

Huge difference, except for best debut, alternative and hard rock. Nothing else is similar to me.