The Mana Pool

For episode 222, we are joined by The Many-Named One himself, Eric!  He's here to pick up the slack for Brian, who had no power at home and thus couldn't join us. But because it's episode 222, we just had to spend a ton of time on everyone's favorite bears! You know, 2/2's for 2!  We're talking about bears of all shapes and sizes.  How the two-drop 2/2 impacts drafts and cubes, the original Alpha...

We begin the episode with a listener question (from Bacon!) about our favorite and least favorite cards.  And because of how our answers played into each other, I thought that might be a good one to answer on the air.  Yay Bacon! That leads (almost) naturally into the rest of the show!  We go from favorite cards to favorite planeswalkers, which leads us to nice roundtable discussion about the 'wal...

Chewie note: Eric wanted his GP Nashville episodes to go up as soon as possible, and Chris Otwell is unavailable to upload casts to the MTGCast Network until Sunday.  So I offered to help a brother out and get his casts out there ASAP for everyone’s listening enjoyment.  Keep an eye out, they’ll be going up as soon as I get them from him! This episode starts with a conversation with Richard F. Cas...

Chewie note: Eric wanted his GP Nashville episodes to go up as soon as possible, and Chris Otwell is unavailable to upload casts to the MTGCast Network until Sunday.  So I offered to help a brother out and get his casts out there ASAP for everyone’s listening enjoyment.  Keep an eye out, they’ll be going up as soon as I get them from him! I managed to follow Jon Finkel's draft, watching him pick u...

Chewie note: Eric wanted his GP Nashville episodes to go up as soon as possible, and Chris Otwell is unavailable to upload casts to the MTGCast Network until Sunday.  So I offered to help a brother out and get his casts out there ASAP for everyone’s listening enjoyment.  Keep an eye out, they’ll be going up as soon as I get them from him! In this episode, I talk about what it takes to run a large...

Chewie note: Eric wanted his GP Nashville episodes to go up as soon as possible, and Chris Otwell is unavailable to upload casts to the MTGCast Network until Sunday.  So I offered to help a brother out and get his casts out there ASAP for everyone’s listening enjoyment.  Keep an eye out, they’ll be going up as soon as I get them from him! I start this episode with a recap of the EDH (Commander) ga...

Chewie note: Eric wanted his GP Nashville episodes to go up as soon as possible, and Chris Otwell is unavailable to upload casts to the MTGCast Network until Sunday.  So I offered to help a brother out and get his casts out there ASAP for everyone’s listening enjoyment.  Keep an eye out, they’ll be going up as soon as I get them from him! For my second show from GP Nashville, I sat down for a brie...

Just arrived in Nashville!  Now to introduce the cast of characters for the weekend, including the one and only Usman from the Third Power podcast (@ UsmanTheRad on Twitter), and to go over some of the plans for the weekend (spoilers: this includes a grinder and hitting up some artists.  Oh, and the GP itself of course).  If you have any specific things you would like to hear on the show while I'm...

It's the long-lost live episode of The Mana Pool!  Well, not "lost" exactly.  More like "we haven't had a hole in recording to fill with this episode" but you know what I mean.  But yeah, this was recorded back in January when we all got together to play at Dirk's house.  We were joined by Ian Shepherd, a kid Dirk knows.  Turns out this kid is the son of the proprietor of Hypermind, a gaming shop...

Yeah, you read it right - we got Bennie Smith! He writes for Star City Games now, he used to write for DailyMTG, and he's here with us to close out Commander Month!  I'm pretty sure this is what's known as "doing it right".  We spent a while picking his brain and asking all about his Magic history - all you've ever wanted to know about Bennie Smith? Aw yeah. We got Bennie to help us answer some ex...

We are joined this episode by none other than Laura Diemer and Bill Boulden, aka Laura by Spruke.  You might know them from clips played right here on the show, or perhaps you bought their album, Katana & Tonic, on iTunes or one of the other digital music distribution services.  If not, then maybe you should! Last weekend most of us went to the SCG Open in Charlotte.  We played lots of EDH, so of...

As featured in Episode 216 , here is the awesome new audio montage made for us by Daniel Beach (who was also a guest host on that one).  He took an unfinished Sprukestep track from the upcoming Factor Friction album that Spruke posted up to SoundCloud and peppered in a lot of random Mana Pool goodness. He said he did it entirely in Audacity, which is pretty ridiculous for a free program. Just like...

It finally happened!  Yes, we finally remembered to grab none other than Jack Antonio Sabato De La Hoya Other Name Lacroix to guest host!  And let me just tell you, this guy is a wealth of information.  We talked briefly about the the latest SCG Open results, and Jack gave us some of his insight there.  With his help, we also covered a wide variety of Commander topics, such as the importance of ve...

Welcome to the first show of Commander Month here on The Mana Pool!  We're kicking it off with one of our long time listeners and constant source of good ideas, Daniel Beach.  If you enjoyed Episode 214, he was the inspiration behind having the ACS guys on again.  If you didn't enjoy it...blame Beach for that. But because it's Commander Month, we've asked Beach to do an Out of the Deck Box for one...

Well, it's the week after the prerelease, so you know what that means, right?  We've got to tell you all about how we did!  Find out who did well, who didn't do well, and how the webmaster Scott did in his first tournament ever! But of course, prerelease episodes are more than just Sealed tourney reports.  We also took the second half of the show to run through some of the listener mail that needs...

Yes, we're doing it again.  Joining us on this episode are Bryan and Christian from the currently-on-hiatus Avant-Card Show, and as always they are entirely too much fun.  This one's a little weird though (even for us) as life gets in the way a bit.  We started one host down and we lose two more hosts over the course of the show, but we still end the show with three of us!  Multiple guest hosts ar...

We are joined this week by Robert Martin, also known as The Beme.  You might recognize him from The Men of Magic interviews.  On this episode, we're covering all the Dark Ascension previews that had been shown when we recorded.  And let me tell you, there are some doozies this week. Interspersed throughout the card discussions are a variety of tangents.  We'll talk about expensive Magic merchandis...

We've got the first of the Dark Ascension previews for you on this episode!  Of course, Sorin popped up after we recorded, so we'll talk about him next episode.  We do have the Zombie Apocalypse though, which is pretty freakin' sweet.  Because of when this was recorded, we're really only talking about the first few days' worth, so we were able to go a little more in-depth than usual. But no matter...

Creatures!  Everyone loves creatures, right?  And what's the most fun way to play with creatures?  In tribes!  Everyone loves some tribal Magic, right?  There's even a format called Tribal, that's gotta mean something!  No we're not even going to talk about the format on this episode, we're being much more general.  This is just all about some of the various tribes in Magic.  We talk about our fav...

On this episode we're missing Brian, who had a last-minute before-Christmas dinner thing.  So We're joined by Brandon Isleib, better known as the Seedborn Muse over on the Muse Vessel !  Of course, you'll be able to find him over on Gathering Magic on Tuesdays from now on, so maybe you should check that out too.  But since we had a guest host, we decided to make a potpourri episode of random small...

Hey look, Bill's back!  And since he's here, we begin this episode by talking all about the SCG Invitational we went to last week.  We've got all kindsa stories and people and things.  There are links to the two playmats we talked about a little further down.  And you know you wanna see ;) Then we have a Magic Mad Lib from Myke Okuhara, which is seriously drop-dead hilarious.  No really.  I might...

This episode is a little out there.  First off, we're missing Dirk because it's his anniversary.  Because not just anyone can fill in for Dirk, we tracked down two old friends to help us out.  First we got Bill, who is kurai_seraphim on the forums and a recent guest host.  Then we tracked down Ben, who is Panahinuva on the forums, Twitter, and probably everywhere else. We start off with a couple o...

We're joined this episode by Tom, formerly of the MTG Radio podcast.  He's always fun to have on the show, so hopefully you'll all enjoy it as much as we did.  We start off with a fair amount of news - new Planechase, Faithless Looting, and the latest WOTC holiday card.  Links to all those are right here: Follow Tom on Twitter: http://twitter.com/MTGRadio Planechase 2012 http://www.wizards.com/Mag...

We really went all out for our 4 year show.  We've got discussions on beating children, Graveborn, panties, laughing thoctars, Horde updates, and the realization that Mike is actually the ruler of all things.  But I'm sure some of you already knew that, you're very clever.  That's why you listen to us! Actually, we didn't exactly realize that this was our 4 year anniversary show until just before...

On this episode of The Mana Pool, we're talking video games!  Reminiscing, really.  But because we're actually a Magic podcast, we're gonna try to bring it back to Magic as often as possible.  What could the different video game genres bring to Magic?  What about the various characters and worlds that video games have given us?  And the question that Brian used to pitch this idea to me: Would Soli...