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 one is another of those free-form rambling discussions with no real point or purpose other than to entertain our thousands of listeners across the globe!  Or...at least the American ones, in this case.  Roughly a year ago, we did Episode 205 - Would Solid Snake Have Shroud?  It was jolly good fun, so Brian thought we should do it again.  But instead of looking at video games through the lens of Magic cards, this time we're doing television shows!  Shows we enjoy, shows we've seen, or just shows we think might work well with Magic.  If you have any ideas or suggestions for shows, then hit the forums or leave a comment on the site.  Hope you enjoy!

Intro & Outro Music – Diamond by Swift – http://www.myspace.com/swiftband
Break Music  - Cheers Theme by Gary Portnoy

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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 years now in fact) and that might be a first.  How cool is that?

Then we have another Magic Mad Lib.  If you thought last week's was funny, then you've got to hear this one.  Featuring 100% less singing (thank goodness), this Mad Lib might be Chewie's favorite ever.  No kidding.  The follow-up discussion was also some top-notch stuff.

"What are the monkey people called?" - Dirk

The rest of the episode (yeah, all that was only like a quarter of it at most) is taken up by our responses to two listener emails.  Tony Mendolia (who never fails to tell the world about our new episodes on Google Plus, even though we've pretty much given up on it) asks us a question about saving sets of commons and uncommons for his kids.  This was a really good discussion, plus it gave Dirk a chance to weigh in with some serious mic time!

The second half of the show is all about Ravnican flavor.  More specifically, the storyline of Return to Ravnica.  Andrew from CO in LA (confusing, innit?) wanted to know about it, since he wasn't exactly sure what was going on.  We ended up going over everything we know, or think we know, and connecting as much of it as possible to the original Ravnica storyline.  Another good discussion, and another satisfied listener (in theory anyway, since we didn't exactly run it past him ahead of time).

Hope you all enjoy, and try not to get stabbed in the uterus.  Just sayin'.

Intro & Outro Music – Diamond by Swift – http://www.myspace.com/swiftband
Break Music  - Youth of America by Birdbrain - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdbrain_%28band%29

This episode’s post: http://themanapool.com/podcast/episode-259
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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 though, so we hope you guys enjoy it as much as we did.

That's not all though!  Before we cut Calvin loose, we had a lot to do.  Chewie spoke for a bit about Grand Prix Charleston, because believe it or not this is the first time we've recorded since then!  Incidentally, have you heard about playing Magic with The Stack?  It's pretty freakin' great.  There's a bit of news, with Duels 2013 getting a new deck pack featuring Orzhov and Gruul decks.  Also, there's a recent rash of card shop robberies in central California.  If you're out that way, beware.
Off Color Cast: http://www.offcolorcast.com
Calvin during the GP stories: http://i.imgur.com/tCp90.gif
Duels 2013 Deck Pack #2: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/arcana/1118
Central California card shop breakins: http://www.kmph.com/story/20269093/thieves-target-game-shops-steal-magic-cards

Oh we're not done yet!  Brian had a very special (and ESPECIALLY HILARIOUS) Christmas-themed Magic Mad Lib.  Seriously, this one was great.  Not just because of the Mad Lib itself, but because of the circumstances surrounding it.  I mean damn.

And if you manage to make it all the way to the end, you can hear Chewie being not gracious at all as he thanks a few listeners for their generosity as well as Dirk complaining about his students.  That last part is pretty funny.  I'm just sayin'.

Intro & Outro Music – Diamond by Swift – http://www.myspace.com/swiftband
Break Music  - Warp Zone Music from Super Mario Sunshine
Calvin's New Jam created by Andy of CommanderCast fame, used with Chris's permission. Sorta. Whatevs.

This episode’s post: http://themanapool.com/podcast/episode-258
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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 last month!

We start off with a nice and sorta quick Commander game.  Then we have a particularly brutal (and therefore short) Archenemy game played with 60-card casual decks.

Of course, we can't have two short games without having one stupidly long one.  Taking up fully half of the unedited time, we played a game of Planechase.  If I remember correctly...nope, I don't.  I've blocked it.  But don't worry, this game isn't actually all that bad.  This definitely wasn't the worst game we played that day.  Hope you enjoy!

Intro & Outro Music – Diamond by Swift – http://www.myspace.com/swiftband
Break Music 1 - Flash Man from Mega Man 2 on the Nintendo Entertainment System
Break Music 2 - Dust Man from Mega Man 4 on the NES

This episode’s post: http://themanapool.com/podcast/episode-257
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