The name refers to what happened to me in a round during last week's mayhem event, full of crashes and bugs: 14 lands (of 22) in the top 20 cards, which is a rate that occurs approximately 3 times in 10,000 times. In other words, if we played a game of Tribal every day for years, the 3rd time this would happen would be in year 2047. So, a little less than once per decade. Needless to say, ending a historic win streak because of the virtual equivalent of getting hit by lightning on magic online is not only a shame and travesty, but pretty suspicious given the plethora of other weird things that went on that day. Amusingly, the previous Underdog a month prior, also a streak breaker for me, was also one rife with issues, that time with gatherling, and only 6 players joined even after prodding around. It seems Underdog has been cursed lately, bringing misfortune not only to me, but other players as well.
Concerning the recent recap of events and banlist revisions - I've only won about 3/4 of the events this year, so please don't heed my obvious ill-informed opinion - but Cloudpost is not a necessary evil; it is an evil evil that should not exist in a format where the tools to fight it are either gone or on the watch list - nerfs to aggro, and wasteland / price of progress on a watchlist. Because of tools like Vesuva, Turn 3-4's All is Dust, or Ugin, are not difficult to achieve, and create one-sided board wipes which end the game immediately. As you can see, this is a deck where the lands are effectively the tribe - 0 mana spells which ramp you and gain you life - and the real tribe is secondary and merely ride of the coattails of the broken raw power of lands themselves.
In addition, now that we are in No Mountain May, I don't expect to see any Prices of Progress floating around to help fight this Cloudpost menace, making this problem even worse. Amusingly, the natural enemies of Cloudpost are on the watchlist, as mentioned before, PoP, and Wasteland, but not the menace itself. Truthfully, I understand the pitfalls of these cards harming multi-color creative decks, but if they are being used to keep the menace in check, why not put the menace itself on the watchlist too for balance? Or at least Glimmerpost, the 0 mana ramp spell and life-gainer? Or outrightly ban them all? This is not a screed to keep Price of Progress or Wasteland, but rather, if you want to take those away, also take away the problem that they fight.
Combo has seen heavy nerfs lately. Now, aggro has been nerfed (even ever so slightly). But Cloudpost is a deck that preys on aggro (Glimmervoid until All is Dust), and also beats midrange too (as does any big-mana deck, like Tron in Modern). When the non-Cloudpost meta is stricly aggro or mid-range, which it is, Cloudpost is too oppressing since it is naturally advantaged in a meta skewed away from control and combo. There's a reason it is banned in Modern, which is even less restrictive than our niche format.
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Rat Control
