The Mana Pool

It's that time again, where we use Gatherer to find a group of unwitting creatures to beat the crap out of each other for our amusement.  I mean...to compete for fame and glory on the battlefield. And charity! Yeah, that's it. Look, what's the point of being able to summon up creatures from around the multiverse if you can't have a little fun with it? But yes, starting with one of the lamest creat...

We're joined this week by Bill Bloodworth, who is Kurai_Seraphim on our forums.  Yes that's his real name.  I assure you he's not just an out of control LARPer.  He came down to hit a Sealed PTQ with Chewie and Brian, so we brought him on to tell us how it went and to join in the discussion. Speaking of discussion, we had a lot of that on this episode.  Listeners send us emails all the time, and s...

On this exciting episode of The Mana Pool we're bringing back a fan favorite segment, the binder pull! We're all just opening up our binders and picking out some cool cards to discuss. Then discussing them. You know. After that, it's back to the emails! We've got a whole mess of interesting rules questions and little tidbits here and there. There's a short rant from Chewie about pottymouths and pr...

This episode is packed!  We start off with our traditional post-rotation discussion.  I'm not sure why we do this, not being Standard players for the most part and being a casual podcast, but we always do and we've always gotten positive feedback about it.  So here it is again!  Did you realize that something besides Squadron Hawk rotated out?  I didn't either! Keeping with this Standard-centric t...

This is it!  We've hit #200!  Because we couldn't do it without all of you out there, we decided to jump through a lot of hoops in an effort to get some listener participation.  If you'll recall, several weeks ago we put a bunch of questions on the website.  One was a poll about which decks of ours you guys liked, and the rest were asking for suggestions for cards of a particular type.  Well we to...

We are joined this week by Amanda Stevens, one of the originators of RedSiteWins.com and hosts of Red Cast Wins.  You guys remember her, right?  She interviewed us a long while back.  And it’s a good thing, because Brian was unable to join us this week.  Anyway, we’ve got to talk about the Innistrad Prerelease, because we recorded this right after that happened.  Mike, Brian, and Chewie (that’s me...

Yes, you read that correctly.  We are joined on this episode by Panahinuva, otherwise known as Ben.  He's one of those omnipresent listener-types, and we love him for it.  Apparently, since here he is on the show again. But we begin with some news.  Well, it was news when we recorded, I'm sure no one really cares much anymore.  But that's okay, we still have to give you our take on it.  They made...

Chewie here.  I got home from a long trip to find that my computer wasn't working...20 minutes before recording was supposed to start.  After trying to coax it back to life, I gave up and had to drive to Mike's place, forgetting to bring the microphone with me.  I also had to get food or I was going to die.  That's how this episode started.  That also explains why I didn't know what episode we wer...

Welcome to another episode of The Mana Pool!  This time around we're joined again by Chris Lansdell, that limey podcast whore that you know from many other podcasts, most notably Horde of Notions and The Great Debate.  If you haven't listened to those, what's wrong with you? We kick off the festivities with a discussion about the newly-revealed (at the time) Planeswalker Points system.  This is th...

News news news!  We've got the announcements about the Duel Decks: Ajani vs. Nicol Bolas deck lists and the Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012 expansion, so of course we had to cover all that.  There was a lot of concern from our listeners regarding the various and sundry natural disasters that hit our area, so we had to talk about that a bit, including a mightily depressing hurricane story from Bria...

Holy crap, a live episode?  Is this why there's no Innistrad episode yet?  I think it must be!  Dirk, Mike, and Chewie gathered together to play some Magic, and so of course we recorded some of it for you.  Because we love you guys.  No really.  You think we get together and have to put up with each other in person because we like each other or enjoy playing this game?  Nope, it's just to give our...

This episode is all about recapping the events of the Star City Games Open Series that took place in Richmond just a couple weekends ago.  Do you want to know what the dorks were playing?  What led Mike on his winning, then losing, then winning tear?  What's up with Brian's odd silence on the matter?  And what the hell was Chewie doing the whole time, since he certainly wasn't playing?  All this a...

Holy crap it's the Mana Pool!  Because you asked for it (well, at least a couple of you asked for it) this is an Out of the Deck Box episode!  We're taking a look at Mike's mono-white Wrath of Emeria deck in all its world-destroying glory.  Then Dirk cries havoc! and lets slip the Slivers of war.  Brian is up next with his Grixis-colored Phyrexia-aligned Rage Extractor deck, which made its first a...

We are joined this week by the highly entertaining Bigheadjoe of Yo! MTG Taps and formerly of SCG Live.  He fits right in as one of the dorks, and I think you'll enjoy having him on to take Mike's place this episode.  Hold out until the end to hear an announcement from Joe about his new wrestling podcast. We begin with Brian's experience at a recent FNM, followed by a massive bout of nostalgia.  I...

Before recording this episode, I put out a call for some topics that we could talk about that required no preparation ahead of time, and boy did you guys come through!  We got a whole massive list of stuff to talk about.  After we covered the Innistrad news from the San Diego Comic Con, of course.  Don't let's be silly.  Mark Rosewater tweeted a recap of the information that was revealed, and I ga...

This episode has it all - thrills, chills, suspense, controversy, a happy reunion and a heartfelt goodbye.  You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll yell at your mp3 player. Well, maybe not all of that.  But most of it!  This episode sees the return of our disease-ridden rambler Brian!  Okay, so that's a bit much, but whatever he's back yay!  To celebrate being back, he's got a brand new idea for the show...

After a bit of email and some news (including our long-lost interview with Amanda, which can now be found on Red Site Wins), we are joined by two very special guest hosts. No longer do we need wonder if these two are actually one and the same person, because I heard them both talking at the same time! Our two special guests are none other than the returning Adam Styborski and first time guest but...

We are joined this episode by one Robert Martin, also known as The Beme. You might know him as the interviewer from The Men of Magic, or maybe from the Hardcast, or maybe even the suddenly-defunct Mana Screwed podcast (go listen to their episodes, dash it all!). He also pops up on Monday Night Magic sometimes! But today, he's here with us! At least, he starts out here with us. Due to circumstances...

After many requests for us to talk about the various cards in the new Commander decks, we decided to go one better.  We all gathered at Brian's house, picked out one of the Commander decks, and played them in a 4-player game.  Yeah yeah, we know everyone else is doing this too.  The reason everyone else did this is because these decks are freakin' awesome, and people love to hear about them!  So w...

This is a weird one.  Eric of Many Names joins us one final time before his family gets back into town, so we're trying to make the most of it.  We mine his brain for some information about Cube Draft on behalf of one of our listeners.  More specifically, he talks about creating your own Cube.  For reference, you can find Eric's own Cube list here . And of course, we have a full load of M12 previe...

We're joined again here at The Mana Pool by Eric of Many Names, who can add one more name to his repetoire - Judge.  Yes, Eric went to GP: Kansas City and passed his test, so you guys get to hear all about it right here! Then we've got another handful of listener mail, including one that we took extra care to answer.  It involved either moving cards from Standard back to Alpha, or bringing cards b...

No really.  They dropped a TON of stuff on us since our last recording.  Apparently I was even allergic to some of it.  Well, that or nerds, not sure which.  But yeah, we're trying desperately to keep up, so much so that we enlisted the aid of the ever-awesome Eric of Many Names once again!  He's going to help us out with the new M12 cards, the new Commander cards, and the other cards in the Comma...

After a few Skype problems that apparently cleared up just a short while before recording (for everyone but Brazil and Dirk it turns out) we finally got an episode started.  And after Dirk reinstalled Skype, he joined us too.  We started this episode off by catching up with our email!  Yes, we covered EVERY email we had in the inbox! If you couldn't tell from the title, we spent the rest of the ep...

This time around, we've got even more listener mail!  Reading the mail leads to some interesting conversations.  We discussed cheating a little bit, complete with judge-type commentary by Bryan from the Avant-Card Show, who happens to be a Level 2 Judge.  There's a little bit of speculation about Innistrad (completely baseless, the best kind!).  And just in case we're right, you heard it here firs...

Even though we ran through over 30 emails in the last episode, we still have more! So we took another chunk out of the remaining emails. I really enjoy doing lots of listener mail, because it lets us talk about all kinds of things we wouldn't ordinarily talk about. For instance, an email gave me a perfect segue into discussing a new repacked product thing I got at Target! But of course, we had to...