Do you have a favorite kind of contestant?

I'm asking if you find that your favorite contestants in different object shows have some general qualities in common. This can be rooted in their competitive style, personality, type of object, or really anything else. If so, what are those qualities? I'll go first. :-P

I find that I gravitate towards characters who have a logical approach to competition/just in general (I wonder if that's a waste when one of the unique qualities of object shows is some degree of surrealism). In BFB and TPOT, Teardrop is a particularly well-implemented example of a character like this; she excels at even weird competitions in a very straightforward way, and in a way that makes scenes involving her entertaining to watch. This also makes her competitive choices a good catalyst for action in general (see TPOT 2).

OJ and Cabby are different examples of this kind of character. Neither of them demonstrate the extreme utility that Teardrop does, but both of them tend to make strategic decisions rooted in logic or empirical evidence (they do this at large, but to get specific: for OJ, see II S1E16, and for Cabby, see II S3E5), and will consistently operate with the simple intention of winning a challenge, rarely sidetracked in the way that other characters are by random/individual items.

There are also characters who I came to enjoy more as they came to exhibit these characteristics more strongly than they did previously. I actively disliked Taco in II S1, but I liked her a lot in S2. Microphone and Knife both grew on me in the latter part of S2, where they started being defined less by single personality traits (being outspoken and a "jerk," respectively) and more by their strategy.

I also have a sort of secondary preference for characters who are just kind of assholes. "Kind of" is doing a lot of lifting here. I don't know how to get precise about this one, but think about characters like Flower (before her turnaround in BFB), Blocky, etc. These characters aren't all exactly mean, but they do all prioritize themselves/the thing they like to do/etc. over the success and well-being of other characters in a specifically comedic fashion. It's worth noting that this one is really subjective, because it doesn't work on me at all when the character isn't comedic. Yin-Yang is like this, but I don't think they're funny whatsoever, so I don't like them. Fan is like this, but has increasingly been written in a very peculiar fashion such that you're supposed to think of him as well-meaning and amicable regardless, so I don't like him [anymore]. Make of it what you will.