Middle School Marauders 02-2019 Coverage and Results

This past week the Lords of the Pit hosted another short notice Middle School event in Chicago, in a recurring series of events called Middle School Marauders (#MiddleSchoolMarauders on social media). Future events in this series will likely be open to the public every month or two, and found on our Events page here, as well as posted online at https://twitter.com/middleschoolmtg.

Tournament Structure and Prizing

As usual, with most local events we try to keep things moving quickly so people can have fun and get in and out, and then go hang out with friends at night afterwards. We often do Swiss+1 with no draws allowed, to encourage people to actually play Magic rather than draw matches, and this event ended up being 5 total rounds.

There was a large stack of Middle School staples that people could choose from before the tournament, and each player chose one card, and then everyone else would end up signing that card by the end of the event. There was also a special Lim-Dul’s Vault given out additionally to 1st place. Check out the cards people chose to get signed here:

Final Standings After Swiss+1

1. Jaco (Enchantress) 4-1
2. Greg Kotscharjan (Landstill UW) 4-1
3. Anthony Zinni (Landstill UW) 3-2
4. Tyler Etters (Rebel Geddon) 3-2
5. Matt Moss (5C Slivers) 3-2
6. Nathan Mullen (Survival GBR) 2-3
7. Max Neumann (Wildfire) 2-3
8. Stefan Croissant (Tradewind Control UWG) 2-3
9. Bob Agra (Mono Blue Trix) 1-4
10. Dan Piquard (Madness UG) 1-4

After a number of last minute cancellations (coupled with the late announcement) we were left with 10 warriors on game day. Next month’s event should have 20-30 combatants most likely. The only overlappping strategy on this game day was Landstill. The local metagame continues to be pretty wide open, depending on what people are playing around with that week. We will not be posting many decklists from these events here on EC in the near future, but will instead continue to post full metagame breakdowns for each event, in order to give people a more general idea of what people are experimenting with and playing in events. It’s a relatively new format to most people, so it is very much in the discovery and exploratory phases of Middle School deck development, which is very exciting.

For deck ideas see our Introducing Middle School article, which has links to the rules and a number of historical events and decks of their respective eras, to get the creative juices flowing. From there you can begin to engineer some decklists, and then test and tune as you iterate!

Tournament Action

While we will not be publishing decklists from this event, below you can find plenty of pics from the games during the tournament, and see many of the cards in action.

Zinni (Landstill UW) vs. Mullen (Survival GBR)