Shards of Alara: A Retro Design Review

So, there’s a new Magic set out in 2025? And its major function is to be a playable collectibles market for a non-Magic franchise? Cool. Let’s rewind the clock to focus on game design.

Shards of Alara, released in October 2008, is a masterclass in combat-centered, multicolor Magic design, with elegance and excitement in equal measure. I want to break down Shards’ successes, its failures, and its lessons for contemporary Cube design — and for that, you’ll need to do a little homework! Follow along using the Scryfall link below:

set:ALA

Before you read on, give the set a skim, focusing on any named or recurring mechanics. Ready? Let’s dive in.

Alara’s loudest design success is in its enticing rares. Nearly every card is right on the money. The high ceilings are obvious — mythics debuted in Shards with a huge splash, pleasing both newbies and veterans with big numbers and big effects.

Even the spikey rares, priced to move in Standard, invite the player to build around them: Cunning Lethemancer is an obvious combo with Unearth in this block, but Time Spiral’s Flashback is an equally juicy way to break the symmetry, or you could simply build a cheap aggro deck that uses Lethemancer as an empty-handed curve-topper. There’s a primal puzzle there in balancing low-curve mana efficiency against grindy card advantage.

Another healthy impulse is on display with Punish Ignorance, a seemingly vanilla rare with a tasteful nod to the grognards. In homage to Magic’s original multicolor block, Invasion, Punish Ignorance mashes together the immensely popular Absorb and Undermine. Cool on its own merits, even to relatively new players, but with a subtle endorphin bonus for longtime players.

These rares make you aspire to something, whether that’s your 8th mana or your 8th card drawn in a single turn or your 8th Ooze token. (And yes, there’s also Mindlock Orb, the exception that proves the rule.) It’s a great top note for Alara’s card file, and as we move deeper to the commons and uncommons, those flavors will deepen and intensify.

The low-rarity cards of Shards of Alara ask players to build around their sweet rares in a multicolor Draft format. To square the risk of manycolored mana with the appeal of the rares, Alara has adopted the brilliant solve pioneered by Invasion: optional, pay-as-you-can color requirements.

For example, though Bant Battlemage is at her best in a

Even in the absence of explicitly multicolor activations, cards like Wild Nacatl or Resounding Thunder offer progressive rewards for multicolor, while remaining strong options in a base two-color deck. In fact, the vast majority of Shards’ multicolor incentives are castable on one or two colors, especially at low rarities:

set:ala id>1 r<r

There are only 3 low-rarity cards per shard that require all three colors of mana to cast. The rest allow the player to pay in installments, or to center their manabase around two colors. A sprinkling of Cycling provides additional insurance against getting too color-screwed. Shards’s color-matters architecture never oversteps into a full keyword or indulgent buildarounds, but is the foundation of a dynamic, ever-challenging rule of engagement.

Alara’s third pillar is in its spectacularly designed faction keywords. Though the original Ravnica block introduced the concept — unique mechanics that each epitomize one in-world faction — Alara was the first to interweave factions into emergent synergy.

Take, for example, the Naya shard’s unnamed “5-power matters” mechanic. There are several low-rarity creatures with 5 printed power, so the mechanic works perfectly well on its face. But it won’t take long for players to discover that Bant, which shares

I also love the restraint that each faction displays. When your new mechanics are such stone-cold killers, there’s a temptation to oversaturate games with the same five patterns. But each shard includes many high-power, exciting cards with no major mechanic at all! These cards are so sweet because they believe in the fun of creature combat. For example, Topan Ascetic is first and foremost a card that believes that attacking and blocking are the best part of Magic, even as its text recontextualizes Shards’ major themes (double-dipping with Exalted creatures; tapping Devour’s sacrifice fodder; enabling big-power buffs). That confidence in the inherent thrill of creature combat is what makes Shards’ mechanics click.

For all that elegance, Shards’ archetype design is not perfect. Esper’s artifact theme, in particular, has no inherent synergy with Exalted (

Alara is not only a treat at the macro level, but also at the scale of individual card designs. The cards which remain powerful in 2025 will be obvious by visiting CubeCobra’s “top cards” page, so I will focus on particularly well-designed cards.

Tidehollow Sculler is Shards’ most enduring cube card, and for good reason. I love that it is a two-color card that suggests synergy (a flicker effect is a powerful interaction, and it will support Zombie and Artifact payoffs) while still providing self-contained, effective power by itself. During a draft, that standalone power will help pull drafters into the

Elvish Visionary does a similar thing, but because it’s monocolor, it acts more like an enabler extraordinaire, drawing the player closer to their synergistic payoffs, without having too much of its rate committed to one synergy. I’d play this in any Green deck (at the right power level), even if I didn’t care about Elves or ETBs… and because I’d pick Visionary highly as a universal enabler, that can make it more likely I end up building around Elves or ETBs!

Finally, I love Ranger of Eos, the Invitational Card for Antoine Ruel and a perfect showcase for opt-in synergy. On Level One, Ranger is a 3-for-1 in a low-curving creature deck.¹ Cast it on Turn 4, refuel your hand with threats, continue to beat down. After you get the hang of that, you can evolve your tactics to Level Two, fetching aggressive cards with more situational appeal like a mana sink or a stallbreaker. But, depending on how your draft goes, you might discover Ranger of Eos’s Level Three: a synergy tutor that can even form a crucial part of a combo. And Ranger of Eos is a cool, appealing creature regardless of your level of awareness! You don’t have to know which combo decks a cube supports in order to pick Ranger of Eos, understand its potential, and tailor your draft accordingly. If you want your players to draft your cube’s niche synergies and feel like the whole thing was their idea… study this card.

I’m unqualified to speak to most details of Alara’s story or cultural influences, but even a quick glance at the cardfile reveals surprising contrasts to contemporary Magic, starting with Shards’ art.

Alara quietly has some of the most unsettling art in Magic. Stark Grixis is storm-lit phantasmagoria; kinetic Jund is hellacious expressionism; chilling Esper is transhuman abstraction. These grim pieces reflect Alara’s story of a world torn asunder, each shard bearing unique scars.

And yet, the evocative power of Alara’s darkest art is fully matched by the brighter palettes of Bant and Naya. Vivid washes of color suffuse many a background, often contrasting the card frame (contra typical contemporary art direction). Painterly, neoclassical composition and posing (lots of three-quarter views of faces, for example) lends humanoid figures an air of the epic.

Shards’ impulse to depict the purest essence of each separate mini-plane doesn’t always pay off. Bant’s denizens, in the absence of Black’s self-interest and Red’s passion, are too often cloying in their holiness and chivalry. Meanwhile, Naya’s Mesoamerican influence can manifest as caricatures of the “noble savage” — see the flavor text on Jungle Shrine or Naya Charm, and Naya’s preponderance of Tarzan-like masc warriors and midriff-baring femme shamans. What, were the Nayans too busy worshipping 5/5s to sew T-shirts?! Later sets in the Alara block will complicate this picture, but for now, Shards is ripe ground for thinking critically about game design and historical power dynamics.

The cards of Shards of Alara are well at home with sets of the mid-2000s or 2010s. Its strongest creatures can brawl with the best that 2012 has to offer, but going deep on its low-rarity themes or aesthetics will require a careful attention to power level, especially creature stats and the relative price of removal. The same goes if you want to drop Shards creatures into a Cube built around post-Guilds of Ravnica creature stats (or even one built around the greatest hits from Khans of Tarkir to Dominaria).

However, outside its particular cards, Shards offers a wealth of cube inspiration: exciting rares that invite synergy without demanding it; a deeply replayable multicolor architecture that goes far beyond the 2020s pattern of “choose from 10 color pairs”; interlocking mechanics that complement Magic’s combat system. You can scale these patterns up or down to any power level, with Shards of Alara as an excellent template.

Thanks for joining me on this trip down memory lane! Feedback is welcome — reach me on Bluesky, and thanks for reading.

“May your plane be more pleasant than Grixis” — a Naya saying