The Mana Pool

Chewie enjoyed asking people Three Questions at GP Charlotte so much that he decided to truck up to Pittsburgh and do it again! As always, Chewie's asking Three Questions to anyone willing to answer them, whether they're a listener, judge, pro player, innocent bystander, or just someone that catches his eye.  The real purpose of this show, like most of the stuff Chewie does, is to entertain you, t...

This is the first episode after Chewie got back from his listener-supplied trip to Grand Prix Las Vegas!  So of course, he has to talk at great length about GP Vegas.  Because it was amazing in so many ways.  Like, SO many ways.  So I'm gonna go ahead and apologize for how long that took, because apparently no one realized just how long we went on about it. Then there's all the other stuff!  Here...

Since Grand Prix Las Vegas just completely destroyed the record for largest Magic event ever, it is a fine time to revisit the previous holder of that record, GP Charlotte.  Of course Chewie was there, armed as always with his trusty digital recorder, his wits, and spare batteries.  He and his fellow dorks concocted this edition of the Three Questions once they arrived in Charlotte, sitting in Buf...

After a brief discussion about being the biggest idiot ever, the dorks head right into the Magic 2014 cards they showed the freakin' night after we recorded the last episode. It's just one per color, so it doesn't take that long.  ZOMG Fish Illusion! Then Mike and Brian tell us all about a PTQ they went to at Atomic Empire in Durham North Carolina. It's a great shop, you should check it out.  If t...

We have an amazing episode lined up for you this time!  We're going all the way back to the first Ravnica block so we can compare it to...wait, what? Oh, never mind.  There's an entire set of Modern Masters and a fair bit of Magic 2014 previews to discuss.  So I guess we'll do that instead.  Do enjoy! There's also a pretty funny No Shyfts too.  Here's that link: http://www.5colorcontrol.com/noshyf...

The dorks are back! After inadvertantly taking a couple of weeks off, we are back with a vengeance.  Of course, there's plenty of big news that has popped up in our absence.  Since Brian loves Maze's End so much, we had to talk about the Maze's End deck that did so well at Pro Tour: Dragon's Maze. There was a big preview of the rules update that is coming up in Magic 2014. Legend rules, playing la...

You've waited all this time, and now it is finally here...again.  Chewie went to Grand Prix Charlotte armed with his trusty digital recorder, his wits, and spare batteries.  After he stopped and bought them on the way.  He and his fellow dorks concocted this edition of the Three Questions once they arrived in Charlotte, sitting in Buffalo Wild Wings actually.  Once the Questions were decided, all...

You’ve waited all this time, and now it is finally here.  Chewie went to Grand Prix Charlotte armed with his trusty digital recorder, his wits, and spare batteries.  After he stopped and bought them on the way.  He and his fellow dorks concocted this edition of the Three Questions once they arrived in Charlotte, sitting in Buffalo Wild Wings actually.  Once the Questions were decided, all that was...

Bryan Prillaman steps in for our own Brian yet again this episode!  Yay having a Bryan! On this episode, we discuss the announcement of Slivers in Magic 2014, Sealed Deck play in Duels 2014, a teeny bit of the Dragon's Maze Rules Update, and of course, the Dragon's Maze Event Deck.  Man that's a lot of capitalization.  Also, nipples on men.  Yes, you read that correctly.  When you went back to rea...

It's prerelease time as Chewie, Mike, and Brian head over to Top Deck Games in Kernersville NC to take on the ten guilds of Ravnica!  Brian's law-school buddy John was there too (as he tends to be when there's a prerelease), as was our old pal Robert Waycaster.  We've got the handy-dandy ditital recorder and we're recording what happens just after it happens so you can get the full story without t...

Bill Bloodworth ( @SqueeGoblnNabob ) joins us again this week, this time in lieu of our usual green man, Dirk.  The new baby caught up with him and he wasn't able to join us.  The first part of the show is a look at the entire set of...oh wait, no.  It's the Banned & Restricted list update, followed by a look at the the full Dragon's... Nope, not yet, then it's the Commander Banned list update.  S...

We've got a full cast plus one this week, as Bill Bloodworth ( @SqueeGoblnNabob ) joins us to talk spoilers.  You know, because we always bring Bill on to talk spoilers.  I bet we bring him back next week too.  But...it's just Dragon's Maze pretty much the whole time.  So there's really nothing else to say here.  We didn't even do final thoughts because we went so long!  And that's pretty much it....

Hey look, Dirk's back! He successfully populated, so now he has two little token dudes at home! We start this episode off with what Brian assures us is quite possibly the most offensive Magic Mad Lib ever.  Sounds awesome!  We go from there to a brief discussion of a recent Standard tournament where a Turbo Fog deck got played!  Also, I point out how Sexy Jake Humphries made the top 8 of a Star Ci...

We are joined this week by none other than Adam Styborski!  He's @the_stybs on Twitter.  For those of you that don't know...what rock have you been living under?  He's the (former) writer for Serious Fun on DailyMTG , the current writer of the brand new Commander column Command Tower on DailyMTG , he's on the text coverage team for Wizards, and he's all about some Pauper Cube.  Oh yeah, he's the C...

We are eschewing the usual April Fool's nonsense this year here on The Mana Pool.  Yes I know you guys look forward to it every year (except perhaps Shred Memory ) but it really gets harder and harder to come up with new original ideas.  So this time, instead of doing something weird (er than usual) we decided to just have a hell of a good episode!  It's guest stars galore on this one!  At various...

Remember the planeswalkers that the dorks made for each other a couple episodes ago?  Yeah?  Well this episode we're doing Story Circles to craft a deck around each of those dorky planeswalkers!  Pretty awesome huh? Of course, that's not all we're up to.  Oh no.  Brian rambles on about Modern just a bit before we get going (weird I know).  We talk for a couple more minutes about the newest You Mak...

This week is a bit of a strange one.  We're short one Lead Rambler, so there's (supposedly) a lot less talking going on.  We're also running out of server space on our hosting site, because Chewie's a big idiot.  Don't worry, all is well now - until he screws it up again.  The way we fixed it, oddly enough, was to record this episode.  With space running low, we realized that the best way to fix i...

Wow, is this really the first episode we've recorded since GP Charlotte?  In that case, we'll spend a few minutes looking back at the GP.  We also discuss the whole Cockatrice thing for a couple minutes.  Brian points out that what you should be doing is don't be moving.  There's fake new babies, a list of accomplishments (Mike is a failure, sadly) and the admission that we're all tired.  Like rea...

So here it is, the long-awaited Grand Prix Charlotte episode!  Chewie is there with the digital recorder, capturing everything just after it happens!  Mike, Brian, Bill (@SqueeGoblnNabob) and JT (@NerdPop140) are basically always nearby, and Jonathan Harvell, Kevin Baldwin (@TaureanMauler) & his lovely wife Angie, and Lyall Alfred (@NewSpectrum) make guest appearances whenever they're nearby.  We...

On this episode, of course we're gonna talk about From the Vault: Twenty.  I mean, duh.  Then we go on into more esoteric topics.  A listener known as Andrew Hunt (Magnor Criol on the forums) supplied us with six 60-card casual decks to talk about.  And we do.  At great length.  These are really pretty cool.  We go over each one, poking at the pros and cons, bouncing potential modifications off of...

Wow, we talked about a LOT of stuff this week.  We handled lots of it in quickfire, lightning-round fashion and you can find the links for those down there after these paragraphs.  Doing the live episode from the Prerelease and having Prillaman on one week means we missed a fair amount of news.  So even though it's not really news anymore, we still decided to weigh in with our opinions.  Yay opini...

We're joined this episode by none other than Bryan Prillaman, one of our favorite dorks.  You know, the mossy guy formerly on Avant-Card Show and now JudgeCast.  We really love that guy.  And our own Brian got sick and died, so we had to find a replacement at the last minute.  And since it was last minute, this episode is all over the place.  We did cover a few important things though, so let's li...

Yes you read that correctly!  The dorks venture forth into the long dark of Lucky's Card Shop in Greensboro NC to bring you field reports straight from the Prerelease!  Actually it's quite well-lit in there, but that wouldn't have sounded anywhere near as cool.  But yes, Chewie brought his Tascam DR-08 recorder with him to catalogue everything we did while we were there.  Well, maybe not everythin...

We are joined this episode by a VERY special guest, Graham Stark from LoadingReadyRun!  Graham, who is a very funny fellow it turns out, hangs out with us for the first half of the episode.  We talk about what LRR is, Magic, having a real job, drafting, Magic, Gatecrash, Guilds, and more Magic.  Probably some other stuff too, it's been a while since we actually recorded this one. After Graham take...

This episode had a great many possible titles to pick from.  Here are two of the ones I didn't choose:  Five Alarm Fire, How Much Mustard Did They Have?  And that's why I love this game. We're joined this week by our old friend Bill Bloodworth, who is Kurai_Seraphim on the forums and @SqueeGoblnNabob on Twitter.  It's almost a tradition to have him here with us when preview season hits, so why cha...