Middle School Marauders 11-2019 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.

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 unused toys for donation to a local group, who then distributes the toys to children before Christmas.

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 foil Nut Collector given out to 1st place in Swiss, as well as an altered Akroma, Angel of Wrath, given out to the player with the Most Creative deck. Check out the cards people chose to get signed here:

Final Standings After Swiss+1

1: Dan Piquard (TerraGeddon GW)
2: David Velasco (5C Tribal Flames Survival)
3: Andy MacDougall (Enchantress GW)
4: Tyler Etters (RG Winter Orb Zoo)
5: Greg Kotscharjan (Landstill UW)
6: Lorien Elleman (Sligh)
7: Tim Baran (Mono Green Stax Land Destruction)
8: Matt Moss (Wild Zombies)
9: Max Neumann (Sligh)
10: Jack Holt (Sligh)
11: Ian Blank (BG Rack)
12: Jaco (Cocoa Pebbles)
13: Brandon Sanders (StifleNaught UB)
14: Jerry Yang (Veteran Explorer Dragonstorm) *Most Creative Winner*
15: Eric Caffrey (Jund Rock)
16: Bob Agra (Mono Blue Dream Halls Combo)
17: Kevin Poenisch (Convalescent Care WBU)
18: Nathan Mullen (BG Oversold Cemetery Recursion)
19: Matt Braun (Gilded Drake-Brand)

Announced a few weeks ago on short notice, this event drew mostly Chicagoans, and a couple of people from as far as Nevada and Colorado. Sligh was the most played deck (at 3 copies), but the field was very diverse, with a lot of different strategies represented, and many regular strategies (UG Madness, Psychatog, Goblins) were entirely absent. The most creative decks on the day as voted by the players were Veteran Explorer Dragonstorm combo, Convalescent Care, a Blue-Red Gilded Drake-Brand deck (featuring many more small tricks and synergies), and a Black-Green Oversold Cemetery recursion deck.

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 unfolding during the tournament, and see many of the cards in action.

Collecting Toys for Charity!