The Mana Pool

This episode we are joined by none other than Dr. Science himself, Cluze!  He did a Magic Mad Lib with us, which is always fun.  Before that, we talked about a bunch of announcements and news and stuff.  No really, look at all these announcements and news and stuff we talked about!  Well, the links are down there somewhere.  I'm sure you'll find them. Then we hit the Gatecrash previews, of course....

We begin this episode short one host, but don't worry about him.  He'll show up in the nick of time.  Brian gives us his take on last episode, throwing out ideas for Hellsing seen through the lens of Magic cards.  Then he and Chewie tell us about some of their experiences with the Return to Ravnica Booster Battle Packs, or whatever they're called.  But of course, that's not why any of you are here...

Chewie got a 2013 Holiday Card!  That's the good news.  The bad news is that Brian was having technical difficulties, causing some serious feedback problems.  The majority of them were edited out, so just trust us that they were absolutely worse than you can hear.  There is also another of Brian's on-theme Magic Mad Libs.  Yay Mad Libs! But this episode is more than problems and a Mad Lib.  This o...

Man, this episode is all over the place.  We have a Cardshark promotion to tell you about, first and foremost.  If you want a shot at winning the five best planeswalkers in Standard, you should definitely pay attention.  Here's the link, in case you can't pay attention: http://www.cardshark.com/Promotions/Default.aspx Then, we hear from a Russian listener.  We've been at this a long time (over 5 y...

We are joined this week by Calvin Russell, also known as Captain Red Zone, from the Off Color Cast.  If you've ever listened to that show, you'll know that he has a tendency to sort of run off at the mouth and end up talking to himself, which is perfect for our show!  We initially brought him on to talk about battle strategies or something, and he did...at first.  It was thoroughly entertaining th...

Hey look, another live episode already!  Yeah, it turns out that the week after the week we took off due to Thanksgiving, Brian decided to go to Disney World and forget to remind us.  We determined that he was missing...about an hour or so before starting.  Since having Brian around was pretty essential for the topic we had in mind, we panicked.  Thus, I bring you the live episode we recorded just...

The latest Limited Resources, posted here because MTGCast is full, and because Marshall is such a great guy that I finally got to meet.  Also, Jon Loucks is SUPER dreamy!

We begin this episode by giving a quick rundown of the last EDH game that we played at Brian's house a few weekends ago.  It was glorious, and terrible, and bizarre, and epic, and ridiculous.  Yes, all those things.  Consecutively or concurrently, it doesn't matter.  Then we have to tell you all about the crazy first game we played that weekend.  It was not an ordinary game of Magic, and it involv...

On this episode, we end up talking a lot about Star Wars.  Yeah, Disney bought LucasArts, or LucasFilm, or whatever the big thing is named and that's what kicked it all off, but we just went on about it for way too long.  We're dorks, we can't help it.  We also did another Magic Mad Lib, because they're entirely too much fun and we can't help ourselves. Then we got into the meat of the episode.  W...

So here it is, the long-lost live episode of The Mana Pool!  Well, not so much long-lost as recorded-and-not-needed.  We recorded this way back in late June when Chewie, Mike, and Brian all got together to play some Magic.  Dirk was all up in Denver and stuff at the time.  So we played some Planechase, some EDH, maybe some other stuff?  I don't know, we're all learning this together.  There's neve...

This episode is brought to you by: Bling! We recorded this episode the night before the full reveal of Commander's Arsenal, so forgive us the lack of all the details.  I do, however, believe that most of what we discussed still applies, so just listen to the episode.  We have a nice big discussion about price points, and Commander, and greed, ballin' & flossin' and...I dunno, white people?  It's b...

As we tend to do with every Standard rotation, we're going to take a look at all the things that we won't be hearing about any more.  Scars of Mirrodin, Mirrodin Besieged, New Phyrexia, and Magic 2012 are all gone, and that means no more Titans, Infect, Elesh Norn, Bloodthirst, Heroes, Slagstorm, Ponder, Swords, and ALL KINDS of other stuff! To help us out with this discussion, we brought on every...

Hey look, we're finally gonna talk about the Prerelease!  Oh shut up, it was worth the wait to have Squanto on episode 250 and you know it.  As you may know, ALL FOUR of the host dorks were at the Return to Ravnica prerelease!  Dirk (of all people) even did TWO!  We had Azorius, Rakdos, and Golgari represented at the one we all did together at Lucky's Card Shop in Greensboro, NC.  How'd we all do?...

Here we are at another milestone episode for The Mana Pool!  It's been almost five years since we started this little show (that's another milestone for next month), and it's been a blast!  Lots of things have changed over the years, most notably our lineup.  Originally, the show was going to be Chewie and whoever he could track down to record with him any given week.  As we went on, the lineup se...

The full set has been revealed, so we have to spend a nice long time talking about it!  You've come to expect this though, right?  All the shows out there are doing it, man.  Of course, we've been doing it longer, but that's beside the point, right? But we're not going to start out with the awesome new stuff, no no.  We have to go back to the Commander banned list update, because we missed somethi...

Yup, it's more Return to Ravnica previews!  You know it, you love it.  Or maybe you just tolerate it.  I know we do!  Here's the link: http://www.wizards.com/magic/tcg/article.aspx?x=mtg/tcg/returntoravnica/cig# We also talked about these expensive guild shirts: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/213 And this No Shyfts comic: http://www.5colorcontrol.com/noshyft...

Look, it's really late.  You're getting this episode really early because I'm going to be at the Escapist Expo all weekend.  Mike and I were up way too late getting our respective decks for the big Saturday tournament up and running, then I had to go ask the hot nurse upstairs if she had a needle to help me get this MASSIVE splinter out of my hand.  Seriously, you guys should have seen it, it was...

Yup, it's preview time again!  We are returning to Ravnica in the next set, Return...to Ravnica.  Really?  Is that the best they could come up with?  Maybe the next time they do this we can just all it "Printing Money" or "Preying on Nostalgia".  Anyway, the Card Image Gallery is right here so you can follow along: http://www.wizards.com/magic/tcg/article.aspx?x=mtg/tcg/returntoravnica/cig# We als...

We've got a lot of stuff going on here.  Chewie announces that he's going to the Escapist Expo in Durham.  For the full list of stuff going on at the Expo, you can just click here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/119032-The-Escapist-Expos-Official-Magic-The-Gathering-Schedule Brian's got a Magic Mad Lib for us!  It's totally not Boomerang.  Trust me on this. Then we get into the first ma...

We have lots of stuff going on this week.  The World Magic Cup happened, for one.  That's about all the discussion we're gonna have about that.  WotC has revealed some information about some products (again) that we feel the urge to talk about.  There's the 2012 Holiday Gift Box, which you can find here: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/arcana/1039 There's the complet...

Hey look, we're doing another Commander episode!  Told you we weren't done with these, what now haters?  Or whatever.  Gimme a break, I never know how to start off these episode write-ups.  But we are focusing on Commander again this week, and of course we've got a guest host.  We managed to snag none other than Tom of the now-defunct MTG Radio podcast.   That show is the main reason Chewie decide...

We're back with another episode to entertain you all!  This one is again inspired by emails we've gotten from listeners like you.  These seem to be more personal in nature, beginning with our favorite tribes.  From there we move into how we started playing and what keeps us interested, and how one can go about getting cards without destroying your wallet.  Then we're asked about our favorite expan...

It's time once again for us to dig into our mailbag and come up with something to talk about!  This time we hit on an email about podcasting hardware and software because we seem to have gotten a lot of those lately.  How many of you are starting a podcast anyway? Then we hit an email that asks about our card preference.  When building a deck, which version of any given card do we like to use?  A...

We begin this episode with a look at the Magic 2013 Event Decks, now that they've FINALLY released them.  If you'd like to follow along, you can do so here: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/arcana/1022 But of course that's not the real reason we recorded this episode.  Brian bought a brand-spanking-new Deckbuilder's Toolkit, opened everything up, catalogued it, and se...