BACKFILE

backfile (n.) the archive of blocks a debater carries between tournaments. This one is every card disclosed on opencaselist.com, ranked by how many teams ran it, and it updates itself every Tuesday. Every count is a minimum. Last drop 2026-10-20.

Type a school. Their positions this season render as you type, with the field's disclosed answers under each. Nothing here is written by us: every line is a round somebody posted.

Since Tuesday

210 teams posted 1147 rounds and 150 new arguments landed on the PF topic.

New York City Invitational Debate and Speech Tournament, Bronx. The most-run card that first appeared in this drop, as it is here:

900 million fall into poverty.
Bradford ’13 — Harry Bradford, 4-5-2013 [Former Associate Business Editor, The Huffington Post, "Three Times The Population Of The U.S. Is At Risk Of Falling Into Poverty," https://www.huffpost.com/entry/global-poverty-900-million-economic-shock_n_3022420, accessed 10-4-2026] // aari
Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are on the brink of poverty. A recent study by the International Monetary Fund warns that as many as 900 million people could fall back into poverty in the event of an economic shock like the Great Recession. That figure is three times the size of the U.S. population. According to the World Bank, 1.2 billion people are currently living on less than $1.25 a day. While the report acknowledges that progress has been to made to reduce global poverty and strengthen the world economy following the financial crisis, the world is still in a vulnerable situation. Global unemployment, for example, is the highest it's been in two decades with 40 percent of the world's population out of work, according to the report. And things could get much worse in the event of a macroeconomic shock, of which the Europe and U.S. are dangerously close. The recent bailout of Cyprus threw the eurozone into chaos, igniting fears that the situation could lead to the next financial crisis. Here in the U.S., a series of automatic spending cuts know as the sequester could cost the economy hundreds of thousands of jobs. The cuts have already threatened the stability of safety nets designed to aid the nation's poorest..
3 PF teams this seasonreached semisfirst seen 2026-10-20permalink

The text a team actually read is highlighted. Everything else is the original article, unedited. Copy keeps the formatting and adds a provenance line below the card.

On the topic right now · Sep/Oct 2026

Resolved: The United States federal government should enact a moratorium on hyperscale data center construction.

The arguments teams are running this week, counted from 73,836 disclosed cards. Latest drop 2026-10-20.

Pro
  1. 01Econ163 teams · finals
  2. 02Grid132 teams · finals
  3. 03Midterms72 teams · finals
  4. 04AGI63 teams · finals
  5. 05Climate98 teams · semis
  6. 06AI Bubble48 teams · quarters
  7. 07Electricity51 teams · semis
  8. 08China41 teams · finals
Con
  1. 01Econ280 teams · finals
  2. 02Midterms122 teams · finals
  3. 03Tech Race67 teams · semis
  4. 04Offshoring88 teams · semis
  5. 05Grid92 teams · finals
  6. 06AI Bubble63 teams · finals
  7. 07Climate71 teams · semis
  8. 08Innovation39 teams · octas

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Search matches meaning as well as words. Filter by side, season, tournament, team or literature; read cards as cut; copy them formatted; star them; export a Verbatim .docx.

How the ranking works

Two numbers, and what they don't say.

Every card carries two numbers. Teams is how many different teams have read it in a disclosed round; two copies of the same text are one card. Best round is the deepest elimination round any of those teams reached with it on the flow.

The wiki has no win/loss data, so best round is a floor, not a score: a team that posted an octafinals doc won its doubles round, but a team that broke and never posted looks the same as one that didn't. Disclosure is voluntary. Every count on this site is a minimum.

One archive, five ways in

Everything reads the same cards.

About this archive

Everything here was already public.

Every card, cite and round was voluntarily disclosed by competitors on openCaseList, the community's open disclosure wiki. This site hosts no original research, breaks no disclosure, and publishes nothing that was not already shared. It reorganizes public material so it can be searched. Backfile pulls one public weekly bulk archive per event from openCaseList's download bucket, the same file anyone can download; it never crawls the wiki.

Cards, tags and citations are reproduced as their authors wrote them. Accuracy and framing are the responsibility of the debaters who cut and disclosed them. Verify any card against its source before you read it in a round.

The purpose is educational: to narrow the preparation gap between programs with coaches and camps and everyone else. If you are a competitor, coach, or the openCaseList maintainers and want something changed or removed, that request will be honored. Backfile is not affiliated with openCaseList, the NSDA or Tabroom. A backfile is the archive of blocks a debater carries between tournaments; this one updates itself every Tuesday.