Michigan Mashup 2026 has come and gone and it's time to recap the awesome carnage from the third MRCA ranked event of 2026. We will be covering the two ranked weightclasses and one of the craziest moments from the event that seemed to defy the laws of physics.
We’ll start with the antweight class and there was a great bunch of robots that showed up. Before we get to our medal recipients lets take a look at the robots that we made predictions for in the RSL recap. All 4 bots we called out made it into the bracket but only two of them were medalists. Let's look at the two who didn’t make the top 4 really quick. Smirking cat saw bot made it to the round of 16 in the single elimination bracket and the biggest shock was Poison falling in the round of 8. The best part is we will be recapping the bot who slain the current champ shortly. We will first look at our third and fourth place finishers, being the tanky 4wd drum of Rules of Acquisition and the 4wd egg beater Sublimation. The first antweight semi final was Sublimation vs our first finalist Cuttlefish. For a moment it was looking like this match wasn’t going to happen as cuttlefish had to use their 20 minute postponement to make sure the bot was 100% before the fight and they eventually did make it into the cage. From the first hit, cuttlefish was in control and sublimation got a lot of air miles in this fight. Cuttlefish won by tap out and sublimation has sustained damage to the drive and lost a wheel guard. The second antweight semifinal was Rules of Acquisition vs Titus. Now you might be wondering who it was that beat Poison. Well that was Titus who is also a 4wd beater bar bot (wow its almost like thats the meta or something). This fight was a back and forth brawl that lasted the full two minutes and went to the judges. Both bots were down a drive side leaving the judges with a close fight. Titus. Rules and Sublimation duked it out for glory and a bronze metal and it was short but sweet. Both bots traded blows for about 10 seconds when Rule’s top plate failed and the fight was called a TKO for your third place Finisher SUBLIMATION. Now for our Antweight finals. We have Cuttlefish vs Titus. Both robots were jockying for position when cuttlefish loses control of its gyro and titus capitalizes. Both bots trade blows until cuttlefish is down a drive side and Titus is showing intermittent issues on one side when Titus gets stuck on the ramp to the pit and the pit opens. DUN, Dun, dunnnnnnn. Titus turned into Ephaba using its one working drive side and the gyro from its weapon to defy gravity and skirt over the edge of the pit and stay in the fight. It was dramatic and it was insane. Titus was able to land two more roof shots and the fight went to the judges. Which ruled the match for TITUS.
Next we went to the beetles. There were some heavy hitters here. Now lets address the elephant in the room. Pipeline punch was at NHRL not Mashup……. Oops. Queso did quite well making it into the bracket before bowing out in the first round of the elimination bracket and Crazy horse girl put up a respectable 1-2 record on the day The two in contention for third place were Culverizer and Risky Biznu. Culverizer fought against the eventual finalist Jester and if you saw the robots after the fight you might ask how Jester won given its weapon was dead and part of the frame on the right side was torn and maybe about to fall off. Well. Michigan Mashup is one of the few events in the midwest that has a pit in the arena. Now I think you get the picture. Culverizer being a “tombclone” ricochet off of Jester and fell into the pit. Our final semi final fight was another offset horizontal though I wouldn’t call it a tombclone as it uses 4wd tangent drive for its locomotion and its geometry is more akin to the heavyweight triton rather than tombstone.Risky Biznu is from a very experienced and well respected builder in the midwest and though it was this robots first event, they didn’t look like this was a brand new bot. Risky Biznu fought against the 4wd beater bar bot of Reactor and the hits from Reactor were explosive. You could say they were atomic. The new bot gremlins caught up to Risky and the weapon failed before being KOed. This leaves us with a horizontal vs horizontal 3rd place match. Unfortunately Risky Biznu went into this fight with a lot of damage and it didn’t last very long. Culverizer got the win and the medal. Now for the beetleweight final and the last match we are covering today is Jester vs Reactor. Jester starts the fight with a box rushes reactor and sends them flying. From there Reactor took control of the fight and landed several large hits including one sniping the weapon belt on Jester. After a few more big hits reactor lands upside down from the collision and gets stuck on the edge of the pit. Reactor gets free but is once again put on the edge of the pit by Jester and Jester pushes them in which seals them the victory. Congrats to Jester for winning Michigan Mashup.
Michigan mashup was once again an amazing event and had some amazing robot combat action. Thanks to the team behind Michigan Mashup and we have a bit of a break before our next MRCA event being the Big Red Brawl in Lincoln Nebraska. I will also be covering RoboBrawl and DPD both at UIUC in Illinois and SEMO Combat Robotics at QuadCon in St Charles, MO.