The Mana Pool

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...

It's that time again! We've left our listener emails for far too long, and now we've got to devote an entire episode to them! I was afraid this episode was going to end up kind of boring, but I was wrong. The great thing about going over a whole load of listener mail is that they lead us to all kinds of places. I'm talking everything from the Rapture to Standard to Cyndi Lauper to another take on...

We are joined this week by a very special guest, Adam Styborski.  He writes the Serious Fun column for the mothership, he writes for GatheringMagic, he's the Casual Editor over at Quiet Speculation, and he writes a Pauper Cube blog.  Here are the links! - http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Archive.aspx?author=Adam%20Styborski - http://thepaupercube.wordpress.com/ - http://www.gatheringmagic.com...

That's right, we've got a stupid amount of content for you on this episode of The Mana Pool!  First off, Brian's unable to join us until later, so we have a special guest host - Tosus!  You might remember him from the excellent custom cards posted on our Facebook page during our last big contest, or perhaps you remember that he's the guy who made the intro you hear on this episode.  Either way, he...

This is one crazy episode we've got here for you, folks! New Phyrexia has been completely spoiled, and we decided to have fun with it this time. To that end, everything in this episode is a look at the new set, no exceptions (except for all the tangents, of course). I mean it, we had no other topics this time around, nothing else we wanted to talk about, not even listener mail! New Phyrexia is ser...

We are living in an age of villains.  In case you haven't noticed, the bad guys are winning.  The Eldrazi are free.  Nicol Bolas is still scheming.  And now, the Phyrexians have taken over the plane formerly known as Mirrodin.  During these dark times, who do we turn to for hope?  The planeswalkers?  Bah.  Since this new breed of 'walkers came to light, the heroes haven't had much in the way of vi...

Welcome to a very special episode of The Mana Pool, featuring a brand new guest host - Ralph the Guest Hosting Cricket!  He's a new addition to the show, and hopefully he'll be EATEN BY A F@#$ING GECKO soon.  Other than that, we've got a whole host of fun stuff to go over. There's an exceptionally long listener Mad Lib to do first.  Then we've got a small rant about some EDH/Commander at a local c...

Just so everyone is aware, we started off this episode short one Brian.  We spend the first half of the show going over our neglected listener emails, which we've been skipping over for the last several episodes.  Guess who answered the most rules questions that were emailed to us?  Bet you guessed wrong! Luckily after all this we were able to find a Bryan to fill the void in our show, so that's e...

Hey, welcome back!  As you can tell, this is another episode where we play out a game of Magic for all to hear.  Well, we're all on our separate computers, but we're still playing, just for all you listeners out there!  Bear with us, it's our first time playing with the new M11 rules, since we didn't want to switch in the middle of a campaign, you know? It's Brian's turn as Planar Guide this time,...