Thinking hard about Magic cards.
Lucky Paper Radio follows Andy and Anthony through the fine grain of Magic: The Gathering, especially Cube. Episodes move from card-by-card theory into jokes, book-club detours, event recaps, and careful arguments about what makes a format feel alive.
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Lucky Paper Radio is a long-running Magic: The Gathering conversation centered on Cube, custom formats, and the small decisions that make games feel good or strange. Andy and Anthony are the recurring center of gravity. They sound most at home when a card becomes a design problem. Young Pyromancer is not just a threat; it opens a whole argument about spell density, interaction, snowballing starts, and why drawing the wrong four-drop can ruin the plan. Colorless cards become a way to talk about card quality, consistency, mono-color aggro, and utility lands that give narrow decks extra texture. The show likes distinctions. Combo is separated from package, package from synergy map, flexible from weak, narrow from strong. That pedantry is part of the pleasure. Episodes often start with bits, corrections, or personal asides, then settle into a careful back-and-forth where each example tightens the category a little more. Guests and friends appear for specific topics, including book-club discussion, Shoebox recap, and deep looks at individual Cube projects. The conversation can wander. It knows that it is wandering. Then it usually turns the drift into a point about the game, the format, or the social life around the cards. The show is also comfortable being silly, self-mocking, and occasionally blunt. Its humor sits beside serious Magic analysis rather than replacing it. One episode can move from pottery banter into explicit comedy riffs; another can frame a discussion of fandom, inclusion, and corporate answers before veering into absurd horror parody. The strongest throughline is affection for Cube as both design object and shared practice. Lucky Paper Radio is for listeners who want more than card rankings. It is for people who want to hear why a choice feels satisfying, why a format buckles, and why friendship may be the real recurring mechanic.
Made for: For Magic: The Gathering players who care about Cube design, draft texture, and the reasoning behind card choices. It especially suits listeners who enjoy detailed theory with loose, familiar table talk around it.
What sets it apart: The show treats Cube like a living design problem, not just a list of powerful cards. Its edge is the patient comparison of adjacent cases, where jokes and digressions still feed the argument.
Lucky Paper Radio is a podcast about Magic: the Gathering hosted by lifelong friends Andy Mangold and Anthony Mattox. Focused primarily on sandbox formats like Cube, which are free of banlists, rotation, and net decking, the show is about the best parts of Magic and how to get the most out of the game.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Andy and Anthony turn Cube design choices into clear, lively conversations about how cards, decks, and rules shape play.
Lucky Paper Radio treats Magic: The Gathering's Cube format as a design problem whose consequences appear at the draft table. Andy and Anthony move easily between individual card choices and larger questions about synergy packages, power balance, deck construction, and…
Five players at Cube Night? Andy and Anthony give your awkward pod a format to argue about.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded lesson in letting cheap spells and carefully protected threats carry the win.
Winning with Young Pyromancer is framed as a question of patience. Lucky Paper Radio follows a deck built to keep threats scarce and spells abundant, then shows why that restraint matters.
Greg, Andy and Anthony test what generic power means when a card is available every game.
Andy and Anthony welcome Greg, the designer of the cube they're discussing, to ask what changes when a card is available every game. Can a powerful card really stand apart from the deck around it? Counterspell and Snapcaster Mage make the question concrete.
A funny, practical debate over whether Echoing Boon gives its cube too much of a push.
Lucky Paper Radio frames Echoing Boon as both a joke and a problem worth taking seriously. Andy and Anthony turn one unusually strong cube card into a larger conversation about power, flexibility, and what makes a format feel good to play.
A practical look at when a cube synergy has enough support to become a real draft plan.
Packing a cube becomes a question of density: how many cards need to be present before a synergy is something a drafter can expect to see? Andy and Anthony sort through the difference between a combo and a package, with seven support cards treated as a practical low end for…
A careful cube-design discussion about why measured power and pick value are not the same thing.
Lucky Paper Radio turns the old power-level joke into a sharper question about how cube designers judge impact. Andy and Anthony build from a thought experiment about a time-traveling supercomputer that can measure a card's effect on win rate, then show why that kind of equality…
A long-awaited five-player Cube experiment finds fresh card interactions without turning the format into a gimmick.
Five-player Cube nights finally get their Star Magic moment after a run of near-misses around the same format question. The discussion tracks what changes when familiar cube assumptions stretch, especially as cards that affect each opponent pick up extra weight without turning…
Progressive politics, jokes first, stakes always.
Adult advice with teeth.
Combative conservative commentary without soft edges.
Ollie Beeks designed the “Dangerous” cube for Lucky Paper Radio’s Obscura event, where drafters encounter each list without prior information.
Young Pyromancer decks work because cantrips still improve your hand even without the payoff.
Lucky Paper Radio hosts Andy and Anthony Maddox examine how colorless cards shape Magic cube design, from color-pie boundaries to deck identity.
Andy introduces a book club episode on Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things, explaining his absence due to not reading the book, and announces an upcoming Q&A for the 300th episode.
A casual conversation about pottery, glazing techniques, and a humorous bit about Nick Weigert, with a brief mention of a police officer's funeral.
A discussion about separating art from artist in the context of J.K.
Greg Cortazzo describes Companion Cube as a 384-card list where any card can be a companion, and that single rule has kept the environment deep for three years.
Lucky Paper Radio centers on 100 Ornithopters, Upkeep New York’s Cube for a Cause, and Zach Barish’s 15-0 record with five trophies.
Lucky Paper Radio's Andy and Anthony spend the episode on how many themes a cube can support, after a cold open full of JNCO jeans, a Discman, Pogs, and a T-Mobile Sidekick.
Lucky Paper Radio's Andy and Anthony compare "regular cube" and "sacred geometry" while debating what a cube's "power level band" actually measures.
Lucky Paper Radio's Andy and Anthony discuss Star Magic, a five-player Cube draft format where the two players across from you must lose for you to win.
Andy announces a live Twitch stream coverage of Cube for a Cause event in New York, featuring cube drafts and special guests.
The hosts thank Patreon supporters and discuss the new Discord community for their Magic: The Gathering podcast.
A promotional transcript for a video game called Cube, describing its features and gameplay.
Andy and Anthony discuss the closure of TCG Player's Syracuse fulfillment center and call for a boycott in support of the affected workers.
Andy from Lucky Paper Radio delivers a passionate monologue condemning a House bill that would ban gender-affirming healthcare for trans people on Medicaid, urging listeners to educate themselves and support trans communities.