The Mana Pool – Magic the Gathering Podcast |

Episode 575 – Urza’s Mythic Legacy
The dorks goof off while doing a Mythic Conscription for Urza's Legacy!

Episode 574 – Historic Anthology: TMP Edition
The dorks create their own set of 20 cards to add to the Historic format on Magic Arena!

Episode 573 – The Return of the Story Circle
The dorks discuss the Commander products for 2020, the design of legendary creatures, and do our first Story Circle in over a year!

Episode 572 – A Brief History of Magic Formats
The dorks discuss the history of competitive Magic formats, from the creation of Type I and Type II all the way up to the creation of Pioneer!

Episode 571 – Brian Talks Brawl Rotation
Brian leads the discussion about rotation and its effect on Brawl, using his own decks as examples!

Episode 570 – The Saga Conscription
The dorks come back from a two week break to do a Mythic Conscription for a notoriously overpowered set - Urza's Saga!

Episode 569 – Throne of Eldraine Prerelease Field Recordings
Three dorks and a Sam head to the Eldraine Prerelease!

Episode 568 – Happily Ever After
The dorks dive back into Throne of Eldraine previews as they finish up cycles and dig into even more awesome & flavorful cards!

Episode 575 – Urza’s Mythic Legacy

By The Mana Pool | Published December 8, 2019 Leave a comment

The dorks are back after taking the week off for Thanksgiving, and we are in rare form. The actual point of this episode is simple – do a Mythic Conscription for Urza’s Legacy. Nice and simple, right?

But since the dorks were in such rare form, we sort of strayed off topic. A lot. Pretty much everyone says something that, in a perfect world, would be cut from the final podcast. But as this is not a perfect world, you get to hear all our nonsense!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:49:18 — 37.5MB)

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Posted in PodcastLeave a comment Tags: Mythic Conscription

Episode 574 – Historic Anthology: TMP Edition

By The Mana Pool | Published November 24, 2019 1 Comment

The dorks are back with more timely content! First up we have to comment on the recent massive B&R update, because it was pretty big. But then we’re shifting to the Historic Anthology announcement for Magic Arena! They’re adding 20 cards from the pre-Historic era (can’t believe we missed that joke on the show!) to Arena for use in the new format and Chewie thought we could totally do that too!

Each of the four dorks picked out five cards of our own to add to Historic! We each came at this from a different angle, so we ended up with a pretty sweet Historic Anthology: TMP Edition. Let us know what you’d put into Historic!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:46:31 — 36.6MB)

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Posted in Podcast1 Comment Tags: Arena, discussion, Historic, MTG Arena

Episode 573 – The Return of the Story Circle

By The Mana Pool | Published November 10, 2019 1 Comment

The dorks are back with a big episode all about Commander! First off we have to discuss all the Commander products that were announced for 2020. We’ll also address the potential for supplemental product fatigue that might come from these products, but it’s not as bad as you might think at first blush. Plus, find out who finally has a suggestion of legs after all these years…

From there, we’re turning our attention to The Mana Pool Story Circles. Turns out it’s been over a year since we did one! We’ll spend a good while discussing how the changing design of legendary creatures over recent years has affected the Story Circle.

But then it’s time to do the thing! I found a perfect candidate for a Commander to build around, not too narrow but not too wide open – Kykar, Wind’s Fury! Twitch chat even got in on the action and helped us flesh out more cards for the deck!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:07:04 — 43.6MB)

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Posted in Podcast1 Comment Tags: Commander, discussion, EDH, story circle

Episode 572 – A Brief History of Magic Formats

By The Mana Pool | Published November 3, 2019 2 Comments

Pioneer was announced as a brand new competitive format, which is something that hasn’t happened on this scale since Modern was announced 8 years ago. We thought it would be cool to go back and look at the history of competitive Magic formats since the beginning. We’re talking Type I, Type II, Type 1.5, and even Type 1.x. Remember Extended? Poor Extended.

To clarify, we’re only talking about Constructed formats that were sanctioned for paper to play at premier events. No online-only formats (though we will mention a couple standouts) and no casual formats (though Commander and Brawl do get honorable mentions for being officially-sanctioned casual formats).

And go easy on Dirk, who is 100% kitchen table and didn’t even know what Pioneer was until we got to that part of the episode. We forgot he doesn’t pay any attention whatsoever to Magic news.

And we finish this episode up with two quick Magic Mad Libs from Magnor Criol!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:09:38 — 44.5MB)

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Posted in Podcast2 Comments Tags: discussion, formats, history, pioneer

Episode 571 – Brian Talks Brawl Rotation

By The Mana Pool | Published October 20, 2019 Leave a comment

Since Standard rotated with Throne of Eldraine that means Brawl rotated too! And our own rambling dork Brian is ALL ABOUT some Brawl, so he wanted to do an episode about it! So we’re gonna hit what left Standard and what that means for Brawl, with Brian’s decks as an example. There’s a good amount of discussion with the live Twitch chat too, which is why you should come join us live on Thursday nights!