Conflux: A Retro Design Review

Hey, our retro set review for Shards of Alara sure was fun — what if we ran it back, but this time focused on ALL FIVE COLORS AT ONCE?!

That’s pretty much the central premise of Conflux. In the Magic story, the Conflux was a merging of Alara’s five shards (Bolas, in his never-ending quest for power, wanted to siphon the Maelstrom or eat Progenitus’s spleen or something). The violent reunification of Alara’s distinct sub-planes was represented in gameplay by Magic’s first emphasis on 5-color drafting.

Magic had seen handfuls of 5-color cards in its past — from Invasion to Fifth Dawn, these cards functioned as story moments and Constructed catnip — but Conflux was the first to embrace the theme all the way to the common slot, adding a twist to the Shards Draft format (at the time, the block was drafted in three packs as ALA-ALA-CON).

It was a bold experiment made with good intentions. Even though Conflux’s strong mechanics are compromised by emphasizing the least fun aspects of 5-color, we’ll still be able to apply those lessons to our Cube design. Let’s dive right in — follow along on Scryfall:

set:CON

Conflux translates its worlds-collide trope into gameplay with a variable success. The outright 5-color cards are exciting and intuitive, and there is support at low rarity to make them castable (at least, by 2009’s standards).

Magic’s color pie is another way to communicate a clash of cultures, and Conflux makes this overt with a Protection cycle and mild color-hate tools. Color is one of Magic’s core strengths as a game, and Conflux’s designers fully utilize that storytelling potential here. The color hate, given the standards of the time, is composed of relatively mild evasion or one-shot removal (and remember, your opponent is likely playing a multicolor deck that has counterplay to your hate!), providing oodles of Draft flavor with minimal cost to gameplay.

The most gameplay-ready designs, though, imitate Shards’s progressive incentives for many-colored decks. Several Conflux 5-color designs are almost after-the-fact Kickers on monocolor bodies. Domain, a returning mechanic from Invasion, likewise offers scaling rewards that still perform their essential functions with only two or three colors, easing the deckbuilding costs.

Finally, Conflux leans heavily into “if you control a different color” riders, with mixed results. On one hand, the non-urgent rewards often make for a light touch; for instance, Dark Temper may be targeting a 2-toughness creature anyways, no Black permanent required. And, Alara Reborn’s hybrid creatures will soon provide the punchline, without totally solving deckbuilding. But at its worst, these templates read like fine print, small extra tracking burdens that add up at high doses to become distinctly unpleasant.

Conflux’s “color-matters” cards are unfortunately not the sole example of excessive trust in misplaced fun. Aimless resource manipulation is all over this card file. There’s three rares in Esper that are monocolored reprints of iconic Alpha artifacts. Three rares, in a set with only 45 of ‘em. And heck, I’d argue that Obelisk of Alara and Font of Mythos are honorary members of the Arguably Useful Artifacts Club, for a total of one in nine rares. (At least they’re clean reads, I guess.)

set:CON r>u

Don’t get me wrong, I love a Rube Goldberg machine as much as the next mage, but all in moderation! When the drafter is already optimizing their build-around creatures, and transmuting their own land types, and updating Domain count accordingly, and tracking which color-matters text boxes are active as creatures enter and leave play, and putting hecking bribery counters into play, the card file starts to look like a big thumb-twiddling contest.

If Conflux was an experiment in pushing Limited gameplay towards 5-color Magic, I think the headline results came back negative. It’s simply too distracting to divert all those resources towards assembling

In Conflux, like in Shards, the new mechanics Exalted, Unearth, and Devour continue to shine. Esper’s insular artifact theme gained a few cards with broader appeal. When combined with the best designs of Domain and color-checks, there’s still plenty of cards whose primary job is to change each player’s combat decisions.

Conflux’s major mechanical novelty is Basic Landcycling. Cycling is most boring when it’s used as a risk avoidance buyout clause or a self-solving “combo” with reanimation. My favorite Cycling designs by far are Odyssey’s cycling lands, Tranquil Thicket and friends (and I’ll be generous and include Saga’s Slippery Karst cycle too). These cards drill down to Cycling’s primary function, insurance against mana screw/flood. A mulligan decision becomes a lot more interesting when your hand is two basics and a Lonely Sandbar instead of a Hieroglyphic Illumination. Obviously you just Cycle the Illumination immediately, but the Sandbar offers a dynamic choice between (weak) land and (risky) spell. Conflux’s basic landcyclers offer similar nuanced incentives.

Conflux also boasts some stellar individual card designs. Path to Exile is one of White’s most powerful removal spells, but is at its weakest in the early turns of the game, when its downside is most salient. Given how disproportionately powerful

For all the originality of its Draft conceit, the way Conflux depicts its eponymous event in card art and flavor text boils down to a lot of cartoonishly xenophobic versions of “we are threatened by novelty and outsiders”. Esper and Bant are giving big Crusades energy, Jund and Grixis are content to pillage. Meanwhile Naya, ALA’s stand-in for indigenous Central America, is… in denial? Or else they are too "savage" and/or "uncivilized" to raise an army? Unimaginative and cliche-ridden, at best.

Thankfully, much of Conflux’s flavor is still devoted to deepening our understanding of each shard, and those pieces are much more successful, especially in Bant colors. Classical poses, like those of Shards art, but I also catch a welcome uptick in abstraction in the Esper-themed cards. (There are a few stand-out cards in Black and Red, but my vague theory is these are generally muddier arts, with a lot of background skeletons and bonfires cluttering up compositions.)

The major insight for me from Conflux is a simultaneous lesson on the most — and least — effective ways to express 5-color Magic. Domain, color-checking, and even mild color-hate can all be cool when diluted with less extreme incentives for multicolor. One pack of CON was mixed with two ALA during its Draft run, and the same goes for trimming some of Conflux’s excesses and its tendency toward card attribute arbitrage.

On power level, like ALA before it, the average Conflux card is on par for the late 2000s and early 2010s, but will struggle to compete with the 2020s era. Keep in mind, when designing cubes that draw on its card file!

Thanks for reading. Keep your eyes peeled for Alara Reborn and remember: Jund feasts on the unprepared.