Hello!

I’m Andy Mangold, the creator of Lucky Paper. You signed up for our newsletter sometime in the past couple of months. If you no longer wish to receive it for any reason, you can unsubscribe at any time. No hard feelings.

We recently released our 2019 Cube in Review article. I'm looking forward to doing these every year and would love to hear any feedback or criticism you have so we can make these recaps better in the future.

We've also opened our testing survey for Theros Beyond Death. Please help us out by completing it, which should only take a couple minutes if you already know what cards from THB you're testing in your cube. Some of you have already done so — thank you!

I thought I would use this email to explain why we're interested in collecting and publishing data about the cards cube designers are playing from each new set — something I haven't done anywhere else.

Primarily, these articles are meant to serve as a resource for other cubers. There is no shortage of subjective set reviews by individual writers, but by surveying as much of the community as possible we're hoping to create a somewhat comprehensive list of the cards in each set relevant for the format. This helps cube designers compare their evaluations to the community at large, serves as a time-saver for players who aren't able to review the whole set themselves, and helps people in the future who may not be keeping up with Magic or their own cube right now. I often see posts in the Discord or on the subreddit like "I haven't updated my cube in 12 months, what are the cards I should be looking at from the last three sets?" Hopefully these articles answer that question more completely than any other single source.

Our second motivation is more big-picture. Card evaluation is hard, and I think it's easy for players to forget their first-impressions as time goes on. My local playgroup has a shared Slack and we're constantly setting automated reminders in the far-future to hold people accountable for their bold predictions during spoiler season. It's fun and illuminating to see how wildly off most initial evaluations are. This survey is like those Slack notifications for the whole Cube community. We plan to follow up these prospective articles with eventual retrospective surveys when a set rotates out of standard, and in the process learn which cards were relatively over or underestimated. Hopefully we can start to identify common pitfalls of card evaluation so we are all better able to determine which cards in a new set will find a home in our cube, regardless of our power-level or cube design sensibilities. I want Lucky Paper to help you make your cube better, whatever that means to you.

My inbox is always open.

Andy