Alara Reborn: A Retro Design Review

Imagine opening a pack where every card is gold-framed. That set was 2009’s Alara Reborn, and the 100% multicolor card file is a mechanical depiction of Alara’s newly merged shards. Alara Reborn wasn’t Magic’s first “oops! all one gimmick” set (that honor goes to Antiquities, or maybe Legions) but it was the coolest. It was a swing for the fences… and it mostly paid off, with a few notable missteps that are equally instructive for Cube designers.

Welcome back to the completion of our design review of Magic’s Alara block. Just like the first two sets, we’ll focus on broad trends that can apply to Cube design, rather than individual cards or mechanics.

Follow along at home, paying special attention to the low-rarity cards that defined this Limited format:

set:ARB

Okay, so I’ve lauded Shards of Alara’s implementation of multicolor drafting because it’s opt-in and gradual, basically 2-color manabases with big dreams. ARB’s approach to multicolor is polar opposite, shocking in its wholesale embrace of gimmick. Every card is gold! This is not a drill! And yet… by dint of sheer delusional confidence, Alara Reborn wins me over.

One reason all this goldness works is the alternate costs and modes, like hybrid cycling or landcycling, sprinkled throughout to alleviate manabase troubles. But I also love ARB’s use of hybrid mana. Traditionally, lone hybrid pips are rather deceptive – they look multicolor, but can be played in 7 out of the 10 2-color pairs, making them function as nearly colorless cards. ARB instead pairs hybrid with non-hybrid costs, an innovative blend of color-pie-preserving flexibility.

Because they’re more castable while retaining full multicolor status, ARB’s hybrid cards are the punchline of Conflux’s numerous “if you control a different color” incentives. And, just like a cheesy joke, my reaction is a little bit of an eyeroll. If you believe that Dark Temper and Bloodhall Ooze provide players with fun draft and deckbuild puzzles in CON, why print a universal solution manual to that puzzle in the next set? Worse, the color-tracking puzzle isn’t very fun in bulk, so I’m left wondering if I’m being pranked.

Luckily, by 2009 Magic had seen an even more indulgent celebration of color, and that set was Eventide (a review for another day!). Alara Reborn avoided those pitfalls. Mulitcolor status is always inherently cool, no synergy needed, and 15 gold cards in one pack is already a bigger statement than any mechanical callout could make. So, we get Knight of New Alara as one sick rare, one common cycle, and 139 other cards that focus on being cool exemplars of Magic’s color pie.

It’s still not the kind of thing most people could draft on a weekly basis.¹ But, if you’re in for bravado, it’s hard not to appreciate how Alara Reborn gets the job done.

I have a love-hate relationship with ARB’s Cascade.

set:ARB o:cascade

On one hand, its heart is in such a good place. Giving players unambiguous benefit, while using randomness to reduce the possibility of min-maxing, taps into the prehistoric thrill of the die roll, the coin toss, the random library of spells. It’s such a valuable pattern that Cascade’s DNA can be seen in mechanics from Miracle and Explore to more radical implementations like Seek and Attractions.

Unfortunately, for 16 years and counting, Cascade has left a trail of carnage in Constructed. Hypergenesis, banned out of Modern from the format’s birth. Bloodbraid Elf, banned from Modern between 2013 and 2018. Split cards, given new mana-cost rules so you couldn’t cast Entering off of Violent Outburst. Tibalt's Trickery, banned for Cascade’s sins and cheating out the back half of modal double-faced cards in 2021. Cascade itself was given a functional erratum in the same B&R announcement. It was either that, or modify how Magic’s mana costs were calculated… again! And Violent Outburst still got banned in 2024 for casting Crashing Footfalls during the opponent’s turn (with Force of Negation backup, as early as their 3rd upkeep).

Four bannings and two rules hotfixes – what a rap sheet! Cascade, for all its casual promises of random fun, has mostly functioned to eliminate randomness by exploiting byzantine loopholes in Magic’s rules. Even the newest Cascade printings don’t imply 2021’s rules change, and that’s leaving aside the fact that nobody wants to memorize mana value calculations in the first place. Cascade, riddled with rules trivia, almost seems destined to recreate through gameplay the famously approachable experience of tax fraud.

And yet, for all its failures, Cascade can be rehabilitated through Cube Draft. Draft reintroduces Cascade’s randomness by restricting card availability, and designers can omit the weirdest cheat targets to match player intuition.² “Game attribute chicanery” is not sweet or fun.³ “Value Cascade” is both.

Finally — finally! — Esper furnishes some artifact cards that interlock with other shards. Etherium Abomination is sweet, so is Ethercaste Knight, and then you have stuff like Architects of Will and Mask of Riddles that are generally appealing packages regardless of how many Court Homunculi you have. Esper’s insularity was the biggest flaw of Shards of Alara, and it’s a relief to see ARB open up its borders.

Putrid Leech is straightforward: it seeks greatness, at any price. And its play patterns are awesome! Let’s say your opponent blocks with their 2/2. Well, you could pass priority and trade, or pump the Leech to eat their creature. But are they holding a removal spell, or sandbagging an Overrun? Do they want you to pay 2 life? Or is it a bluff? This kind of evolving, probabilistic, what-are-they-thinking decision is Magic’s gold dust. When WotC bottles the experience outside of combat, it doesn’t always turn out well, so I love that Putrid Leech generates bluffs while still offering the raw stats that make it appealing in Draft.

Qasali Pridemage is, meanwhile, one of the finest examples of Exalted’s potential. Like I discussed in ALA, Exalted makes combat more fun and scales nonlinearly with other combat keywords. So when Qasali Pridemage offers a whole different decision to make – trading for a problematic noncreature at the cost of board presence – I fall in love all over again.

The heretic Renalus of Lorescale Coatl has rejected etherium. So has the unnamed Vedalken Heretic. Although they’re presumably the same guy, Alara Reborn never deigns to clarify, and Magic never even mentions Renalus again. Meanwhile, the Seekers of Carmot would have their quest unfulfilled for seven years, until C16’s Breya, but this feat isn’t mentioned anywhere (nor is it even stated definitively). This is what confident lore looks like to me. Confident storytellying resists the cheapening impulse to explain exhaustively, instead allowing unresolved mysteries to ensorcell the world and its denizens.

The Alara block continues to set a highwater mark for classical figures with color-drenched backgrounds, and Reborn even offers some new innovations. For example, I’ve always been haunted by Thought Hemorrhage’s quiet brutality, and experiencing this violation of Esper’s solipsism wouldn’t be possible without Reborn’s merging of the shards.

Many other illustrations are lively and affecting. The repeated gold frame could grow monotonous (or worse, detract from the legibility of a pack), but alongside CON and ALA, it remains an inviting visual highlight.

From Alara Reborn I derive three lessons.

First: gimmicks have to be built on solid fundamentals. Alara Reborn works in spite of its absurd premise, because its cards are independently functional and cool.

Second: Cascade’s unhealthy impact in Modern belies its potential in Limited. Knowing that Cube designers often outsource testing to Constructed players, I wonder if we ought to temper that feedback with the knowledge that Constructed can cause a mechanic to degenerate to its least fun, most rulesy outcomes.

Third: Putrid Leech for President. (It would certainly be an improvement.)

Thanks for reading, and as you reconsider Alara’s cards for your cube, remember: Alara's burning blood cannot be contained by mere pen and paper.