Yeah… WTF?

These Mana and Health “potions” are actually energy drinks from a company founded by gamers called Harcos. Their tagline is so freaking corny; “Replenish or perish”. PERISH. I guess you can’t really come up with something cool when you’re trying to sell energy drinks shaped like mana and health potions. The potions are targeted towards gamers for their long nights of well, gaming.

The energy potions come in two flavors/types/colors/whatever as you can see from the picture. You got the Mana Energy Potion which is the blue-ish one and it’s supposed to be citrusy “with a bit of a sour bite”, whatever that means.

Then you got the Health Energy Potion. It will bump your HP up +160! OH SHEET. It has a apple-cinnamon taste which doesn’t sound too good. I imagine it tastes like big red gum in liquid form. Ew.

Oh wait, it’s an energy shot, not an energy drink (according to their about page). They’re pretty small at about 1.69-ounces. Red Bull is 8.3 ounces and that can is tiny. So these must be midget-sized. But it has twice the caffeine of Red Bull. It also has lots of vitamins and stuff like ginseng, elderberry(wtf is this, sounds like some mythical fruit), and biotin. They’re also saying that there ain’t no sugar nor aftercrash.

Doug Aamoth at CrunchGear did a review of the Health one. Check it out:

Pros:

• Tastes pretty good. Even though there’s no sugar, it’s hard to tell the difference.
• Goes down quickly and starts to work within minutes thanks to a double dose of caffeine. It’s almost alarming – definitely faster than coffee or any other energy drink I’ve tried. One time when I was a little kid, someone hit me in the face with a snowball as I was walking to the bus stop. That’s the only other time I remember being jolted awake as quickly.
• The lasting effect is smooth and even and tapers off slowly, so there is indeed not much of an after crash, if any.

Cons:

• Promises “as much caffeine as two cans of Red Bull” but doesn’t contain as much combined energy ingredients as two cans. I drank three of these but it sure didn’t feel like drinking six cans of Red Bull. The double caffeine accounts for a nice initial kick, though.
• The $3.45 MSRP is insane. It should cost less than half that. A two-pack sells on the drink’s website for $6.90 plus $7.81 shipping and handling. Thankfully it’s sold in stores too, so you can avoid shipping charges.

So I guess they do work. And surprisingly, he said the health potion actually tasted good so I’d be willing to try it out. But it costs freaking $3.45… EACH! Damn man. That’s like 3.5 Junior Bacon Cheesburgers.

If you’re still willing to shell out three and a half bucks each, Thinkgeek has ‘em for sale or you can get them straight from the source at manapotions.com.