General [Lucky Paper] Cube Retrospective: 2019-2020

[landofMordor]

We recently crunched some numbers for a data-driven look at under- and over-rated Cube cards from the recently rotated Standard sets:

https://luckypaper.co/articles/2021-standard-rotation-cube-retrospective/

I know there are some dataheads around here, and since this is a first for us, I'd especially love any thoughts on the presentation/clarity/analysis of this data. But that's not the only thing I want to know:

What surprised you most about the findings?
What called shots (or missed shots) did you have?
What favorite cards of yours from these sets flew under the radar?
What cards are you inspired to try that you missed the first time around?

Thanks for reading, and enjoy!

 

[TrainmasterGT]

Great article Parker!

What surprised you most about the findings?

That the Elder Giants were initially underrated. I literally avoided these cards because I thought they were too strong!

What called shots (or missed shots) did you have?

I called Barrin, Tolarian Archmage being overrated. Man-O'-War never really impressed me when I played it, and this card is harder to cast. The trinket text about bouncing things back to your hand always felt irrelevant when I played it in my Brawl party deck, I have no idea why people thought this card would be good outside of low power environments.

What favorite cards of yours from these sets flew under the radar?

Ethereal Forager is my BAE these days! Feels like it escaped from 2014 Standard along with some of the Escape cards from Beyond Death.

What cards are you inspired to try that you missed the first time around?

From this list? Probably just Shadowspear. I think I had a pretty good handle on these sets the first go around.

Thank you again for such a thought-provoking read!

 

[landofMordor]

Great article Parker!

Thanks for the kind words

were initially underrated.

I'm gonna go a bit semantic here -- "underrated" technically isn't true. The number by which we obtain that observation is derived from whether or not people who responded to our survey in early 2020 are playing the Titans in the present day. So it doesn't have anything to do with their "rating" (as in the number they reported on the survey) -- it simply suggests that people who didn't play the Titans before (whether they thought they were too strong, too weak, too weird) are now playing the Titans at a higher rate. So throughout the article we try to use "Underestimated" as a way of avoiding this idea. Sorry to "well, actually" you but that's what you get for engaging deeply with the content and then making a high-effort response no good deed goes unpunished!

 

[TrainmasterGT]

Thanks for the kind words

I'm gonna go a bit semantic here -- "underrated" technically isn't true. The number by which we obtain that observation is derived from whether or not people who responded to our survey in early 2020 are playing the Titans in the present day. So it doesn't have anything to do with their "rating" -- it simply suggests that people who didn't play the Titans before (whether they thought they were too strong, too weak, too weird) are now playing the Titans at a higher rate. So throughout the article we try to use "Underestimated" as a way of avoiding this idea. Sorry to "well, actually" you but that's what you get for engaging deeply with the content and then making a high-effort response no good deed goes unpunished!

The funny thing is I actually complimented the use of Under/Over estimated in the article somewhere on Discord after I wrote this post but about 2 minutes before you posted this response.

But I appreciate the semantic choices here, it goes a long way to stop the random arguments over essentially nothing that tend to go hand in hand with cube conversations lol.