Enjoying everyone's comments so far. It was fun to contribute to putting this together. Of course, as @pzerbo says, its all opinions and not a definitive *anything*, other than amassing the attempts at honest ratings of a handful of us.

It's one thing to slap a 4 or a 5 onto an individual show a couple hours or days after you attended. The exercise gets a lot more interesting (and confounding - for me at least) when you are looking at a comprehensive list of the year's shows, and trying to rate them, relative to each other, in an honest way. If you are ranking 40 shows from 1 to 10, and try to keep your overall average around 5...it gets tricky. In a good way.

The real takeaway is how great 2013 is. I'm a general fluffer of course, but in a holistic way. I love all of phish of course, but I have no problem calling individual shows stinkers or flat here and there, relative to other phish shows. Point being, the top 10 came out of a quantitative method (applying, of course, our subjective opinions about the shows) - it was not, I think importantly, influenced by discussion or collective decision to slot any given show in any given spot.

And there were a lot of close calls, top to bottom. Virtually every show this year had at least one stretch of really excellent improv, worthy of multiple relistens. And thats just the baseline - even shows that would have come in ranked 30 or below. Its a level of consistency not heard in a long time, to my ears.