So there I was, just coding at my desk, when a huge Fel Reaver came striding up asking, no… demanding combat per my latest code broken on our production environment. Fortunately, I am a level 70 paladin webmaster. I tried to cast my ColdFusion Aura, but couldn’t muster the energy! Damn that all-night battle I had with a tribe of murlocs. Never say die, I whipped out this cool expensive mana potion ( it costs 5 silver or 7 dollars in real money), instantly restoring 3,000 mana. I found myself completely able to blast him skyward out of the Corporate Cubicle Forest, saving the Server of Light!

Mana was made for Warcrack addicts by Warcrack addicts. the two founders, Aaron Rasmussen and Elijah Szasz were overworked geeks in the tech industry and eventually resorted to energy shots after being pushed into one too many long-nights working on robotics projects. They dubbed their potion “Mana” after the potions found in Blizzard’s Warcraft MMORPG. “It’s much easier to just kill boars in-game and take their mana potions than to make a functional real-life product, but at the end of the day we’re very happy with the outcome; so are the boars,” Aaron Rasmussen said.

So what if you are not a gamer? Well the novelty is probably going to wear thin – but for as much work went into making this bottle look like Mana found in-game, it makes it that much more fun to be able to down this IRL.

Packaging: 10
I have seen energy shots in little vials, put into handlebars and in little unbreakable dildos, but this is without doubt the coolest energy potion container ever. If you ever got into Lord of the rings, Harry Potter or Narnia, you will completely flip over the creation of an energy drink shot in as little olde tyme potions bottle. The liquid inside even changes color depending on the oxidation of the liquid inside, from a bluish aquamarine to a deep green. My only issue with this is that they don’t list the caffeine content – although there is the warning on the bottle that states that it should not be “Consumed bymortals under 16. “

Taste:9
This is one of the best energy shots I have had in a while – easy to drink down and tasty without being bitter overkill or medicinal. It has a lovely strong citrus flavor, very different than I was expecting with the blue color. I was really expecting blue raspberry, which I heard was one of the flavors they tried out without much success. This one turned out great – it is a gummy sweet and sour mix that reminds me more of a super-concentrated kool-aid than anything else. For an energy shot – this one beats most others I have had.
Nutrition:9
I love it when a product is thought through all stages of development. Not only does this drink look cool and fit a niche well, but they did not skimp on the ingredients, creating an original mix that works wonders as well as tastes great. This shot contains all your energy drink mix ingredients, including a full allowance of vitamin B complex, vitamin c, enough niacin to flush you beet red if you are not careful, taurine and glucuronolactone, and a 400 microgram enzyme blend (amylase, cellulose, lactase, lipase and protease) that warms you up and gets you hopping. This really boosts you to dizzying levels of energy with 160mg of caffeine – and keeps you up and at it for hours and hours. This is also free of calories, althought using Aspartame as a sweetener is not so hot. They list sucralose as an ingredient, as well as Phenylalanine which is half of aspartame.
Either way, nutrition is not what matters here – the boost is real and powerful and will keep you through your quest and then some – and you wont let your guild down even at 4AM.

Website:8
Very clever site – although is is a little hard to navigate. The overall look fits very well within the theme and scope of warcraft, without being a direct rip-off. Once you figure out that you use the bottom icons for searching the site, everything moves much more smoothly. I thought it was pretty funny that this site is still very geek heavy – with just as much on the cool fireball cannon than on the drink itself. It adds a very nice touch showing the geek behind the drink – that these people are really the D&D playing robot war building computer nerds you would hope would be behind a drink such as this. This is actually one of the biggest selling points of the site – that while it has all the stuff a site should have ( a shopping cart, a location finder, about the company) this site is built with a programmers asthetic. You could tell that while they had a designer do the pictures and flash, they did the backend without a very clear understanding to the UI and how to build a front end. The backend is fine, using ajax and php and all those goodies, but it has the css right in the code as well as the leftover macromedia tags.
Still, if you get into the drink and the scene, this site is a great clearinghouse for that kind of person ( you know who you are…)