Hi. Long time no see.

Hi. Long time no see. How have you been?

I know. Four years is a long time to disappear. I owe you an explanation, and I owe you something worth coming back to. I think I've got both.

Where I went

As you probably know, I was attending law school. I had big goals for Buildacase when it first launched, but I had to put them on pause to focus on my career. Now, I'm about to graduate, I've done well for myself in law school, and I have the summer off, so I've had some free time to actually finish up and push the new updates.

I'm excited to share relevant skills I learned in law school with you. You're going to notice in new articles my voice has changed since the last lesson of the old Buildacase. I'm far clearer and precise; more point-first and simple. I've very lightly edited the old lessons to reflect some new principles I've adopted to write clearly and with impact. If you liked my voice in old Buildacase, you will like it in the new one too (I hope lol).

What I kept

Law school gave me almost four years to think about where I want to take Buildacase next. The Wordpress blog was fine, but what you're experiencing now is what I wished it had been all along.

Every lesson is still here. The Foundations track, the Advanced track, the Judging track. I went through each one, cleaned up the writing, fixed the things which always bothered me, and made sure they still hold up. They do. The core curriculum is 25 lessons across three tracks now, and I'm proud of every single one.

The motions database is still here. 265 hand-picked motions, categorized by topic and difficulty. The blog posts are still here. If you had a favourite article, it's still where you left it.

What's new

A lot. I'll walk you through it the way I imagine you actually using the site.

You show up. Maybe it's been four years since you last visited. Maybe someone just sent you a link. Either way, you land on the homepage and you see three paths: Learn, Practice, Compete. Pick whichever one sounds right.

Say you pick Learn. There are three lesson tracks now: Foundations for people starting from scratch, Advanced for people who want to get better at the hard stuff (extensions, whip speeches, motion strategy), and Judging for people who want to understand the other side of the table. All free, all open. You can start anywhere.

Say you pick Practice. There's a motions database with filters. There are structured drills with worked answers (these need a free account so we can track your streaks). There's an argument builder which walks you through constructing a case step by step and tells you where the gaps are. And there's the Daily Motion: a new motion every day with a game attached to it. I won't spoil how it works. Just try it.

Say you pick Compete. There's a live tournament calendar now. It pulls from the Global Debating Spreadsheet every hour, so when someone adds a tournament, it shows up on Buildacase automatically. You can mark which tournaments you're planning to attend, and after the tournament, the site asks you how it went and gives you a space to reflect. More on that in a second.

Accounts and progress tracking. You can create a free account now. Sign in with Google or a magic link. Your lesson progress, drill streaks, and argument history sync across devices. Your progress, streaks, and tournament history all live in your profile.

Trophies. This one's fun. Buildacase now has a trophy system. You earn trophies for streaks (practicing consistently), exploration (completing lessons and drills), and milestones. They show up on your profile. Some of them are hidden. You'll know when you find one.

Streak calendar. Your profile has a visual calendar showing every day you practiced. Green squares for active days. It's weirdly satisfying to watch it fill up. You also get one streak freeze per month, because life happens and losing a 200-day streak to a bad wifi day would be cruel.

Profiles and a leaderboard. You can see other people's profiles: their trophies, their streaks, the tournaments they've attended. There's a leaderboard if you're the competitive type. You control what's visible on your profile. Want to show everything? Go for it. Want to show just your name and trophies? That's fine too.

Comments. You can comment on blog posts and tournament pages. One level of replies, no infinite threads. If someone says something useful, you can mark it as helpful. That's it. I don't want this to become a forum. It's a place to ask a quick question or share a thought, not to have arguments about arguments.

Tournament analytics. This is the one I'm most excited about. If you use Tabbycat for your tournaments, you can now import your results automatically. Paste the Tabbycat URL, enter your name and team code, and Buildacase pulls in your speaker scores, team placements, round-by-round results, and break status. No manual entry. Ten seconds and you're done.

Once you've imported a few tournaments, the site starts building your debate profile: position performance, score trends, topic strengths, consistency metrics. The more tournaments you import, the deeper the insights get.

Notifications. The site can notify you when someone replies to your comment, when you earn a trophy, or when a tournament you signed up for is coming up. Notifications are quiet by default. You get a daily summary, not a stream of pings. You can turn on real-time if you want. Announcements from me are always delivered.

How I imagine you using this

Here's the thing I kept coming back to while building this: Buildacase should feel like a training companion, not a social network.

You wake up. You open the site. You play the daily motion. Takes five minutes. If you've got a tournament coming up, the site knows about it and subtly adjusts: drills are filtered to your format, the motions page pre-selects BP or AP or whatever you're competing in. You don't have to do anything. It just helps.

After a tournament, you get a gentle nudge: "How'd it go?" You can log your results and write a quick reflection. What went well. What you want to work on. Motions which tripped you up. This is private by default. It's a journal, not a performance.

Over weeks and months, your profile fills up. The streak calendar goes green. Trophies accumulate. You're not competing with anyone except the version of yourself from last month. If you want to check the leaderboard, it's there. If you don't, you'll never see it.

That's the vision. A place you come back to because it makes you better.

The 365-day prize

I'm going to do something which might be stupid or might be brilliant. If you practice on Buildacase every day for a full year, 365 consecutive days, you get to choose one of three prizes:

1. I pay for your registration to a tournament of your choice.
2. I attend a tournament with you.
3. I donate an amount equal to a tournament registration fee to a charity of your choice.

I'm serious. The details are on the site. There's a cap of 10 prizes per year so I don't bankrupt myself, and I reserve the right to make sure the streak is legitimate. But the offer is real.

I want to reward consistency. Debate is a skill which compounds over time, and the people who practice every day for a year will be unrecognizable by the end of it. This is my way of betting on that.

Easter eggs

There are some hidden things on the site. I won't tell you what they are or where they are. Some of them are trophies. Some of them are just for fun. If you find one, you'll know.

Where things stand right now

Buildacase is free right now. The lessons and core tools will always be free. I built this because good debate education shouldn't be locked behind paywalls, and because the good resources are scattered across dead blogs and paywalled PDFs and oral traditions which only reach people who happen to know the right coaches. I can't promise it stays exactly this way forever, because running a site costs money, but the core of the site will always be open.

Right now, there's no AI in the teaching. The argument builder checks whether you've completed each step. It doesn't generate arguments for you. Debate is a human skill and I believe in human-built education. That said, I have ideas about how AI could genuinely help debaters practice, and I'll probably explore those eventually. If and when I do, I'll be transparent about it.

There are community features on the site: comments, profiles, a leaderboard, tournament attendance. It's social in the sense that debaters can find each other and see each other's progress. But the core of the site is lessons and tools.

What's next

For now: nothing. I'm freezing new features and focusing on making sure everything works well. I've been building in the dark for a long time and I need to see how actual humans use this before I add more.

Eventually: I have ideas. Big ones. But they can wait. The foundation is solid and the content is real. That's enough for now.

One more thing

I never forgot about this community. I know it felt like I did. Four years of silence looks a lot like abandonment, and I understand if some of you moved on. That's okay.

But for the people who bookmarked the old site, who shared those blog posts with their novices, who told me at tournaments that Buildacase was the thing which finally made debate click for them: this is for you. It was always for you.

I'm back. The site is rebuilt. Everything you loved is still here, and there's a lot of new stuff to explore.

Go try the daily motion. Tell me what you think.

See you around.

— Matt