Middle School Marauders 04-2019 Coverage and Results

This past week the Lords of the Pit hosted another 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 usually 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 6 total rounds. This was a charity event where we collected physical school supplies to donate to the Charles S. Brownell Elementary School.

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 altered Lotus Petal given out to 1st place, as well as a special altered Pernicious Deed given out for Most Creative Deck, both altered and donated by Lord Hahn. Check out the cards people chose to get signed here:

Final Standings After Swiss+1

1. David Gleicher (Sligh)
2. Lee Cote (Brushopper Geddon GW)
3. Matt Braun (Tax Aggro RW)
4. Carter Petray (The Rock BGW)
5. Greg Kotscharjan (Landstill UW)
6. Brandon Adams (Imperial Aluren)
7. Jaco (Enchantress)
8. Tyler Etters (Burning Slide RW)
9. Andy MacDougall (UW Control)
10. Max Neumann (BUG Intuition Control)
11. Nathan Doromal (Mono Black Aggro)
12. Matt Moss (Survival Slivers)
13. Chris Bergeson (Mono Black Aggro)
14. Zack Zurawski (Welder Stax)
15. Bob Agra (Worldgorger Dragon Combo)
16. Nick Rohr (Digger Browse UW)
17. Ian Blank (BG Pox)
18. David Velasco (Food Chain BGW) *MOST CREATIVE DECK WINNER*
19. Nathan Mullen (Reanimator)
20. Lord Hahn (Metalworker Red)

After capping registration at 28 due to space, a late season snowstorm rolled into Chicago this weekend, dumping 6 inches of snow after being 68 degrees literally the day before. This caused a series of late cancels, and we were left with 20 battle hardened veterans on game day. Psychatog disappeared from the metagame, and Mono Black was the only duplicate strategy in the room (and even those two decks were very different). 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.

Adams (Imperial Aluren) vs. MacDougall (UW Control)