Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1303: Conflux

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

In this podcast, I talk about the second set of the Shards of Alara block, Conflux.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for their drive to work. Okay, so one of my ongoing goals of my podcast is to do a podcast on every single magic expansion. And I have a lot of podcasts to make, so luckily that keeps me busy. So anyway, today we're up to Conflux. Conflux with the second set in the Shards of Alara Block. So Shards of Alara.

So it came out in February 6, 2000. In 2009. But in order to talk about Shards of Alara Block, I did do a podcast, I think with Devin Lowe talking about Shards of Alara, but let me go a little history in Shards of Alara to set the theme for Conflux, because a lot was going on with Conflux gets it there. Okay, so I became head designer for Ravnika, but Bill Rose, who was my boss, had an idea for a block, and he really wanted to do a block. and what you say to your boss when they really want to do something is,

yes, sir. Anyway, Bill's idea was, so this was our third multicolor block. Our first multicolor block was invasion, also led by Bill, which really was kind of play as many colors as you could. The second multicolor was Ravnika that I led, which was play as few multicolored, few colors as possible, but two being it was multicolor. So Bill said, well, we've done two.

we've done play four or five, how about three? So the idea was, Bill's idea was we would start with three. We do ally, because we always said ally before enemy back in the day, but, you know, ally before wedge, or arc before wedge. And then we would, the second set, Conflux, would lean you toward playing five color. And then the big dramatic finish was going to be Shards, Lara Reborn, which was going to be all.

all gold, an all gold set, what we used to call a gimmick set, and that would focus more on two-color play. So this was Bill's master plan, three, then five, then two, which I will admit, it's a little complicated to put together. So let me talk a little bit about Shards O'Lara, because Bill really was interested in being a bit more experimental. I'm not thought of Shards was his last design. I think it might have been his last lead design Anyway, Bill really was interested in trying a bunch of things So if you've ever seen the list of designers They were on the Shards of Alara team

It is basically everybody who was in R&D at the time Which was in the teens Like 16, 17 people or something So the idea was that Bill Bill just tried a lot of experiments He was constantly changing the team He was trying a lot of different things And one of the things we did

which we did at the tail end was we made mini teams. Now, we had done mini teams for projects before, meaning there's something we need to figure out. Let's say a mechanic in the set isn't working. We quickly have to find a replacement for it. We'd throw together a mini team, which is a team usually of three, four people

that would go off on a problem. And usually mini teams don't last very long. This was the first time we used mini teams within the context of a larger team. So for those that don't know, the creative team came up with a really cool premise for Shards of Alara. And that premise was that something happened to the world of Alara that broke it into five shards. And those shards each only had three of the five mana.

They had a color and its two allies. Bant was white and its allies, blue and green. Esper was blue and its allies, white and black. Grixis was its allies, black, with Ritz. red and blue. John was based red with its allies, green and black.

And then Naya was green with its allies, red and white. And the idea is that each world was a world that a color was absent of its enemies. What would a world be like where white didn't have to deal with black or red? Or blue didn't have to deal with red or green.

Black didn't have to deal with green or white. Red didn't have to deal with green or white. with blue or white and green did not have to deal with black or blue. What would those worlds be like? That was the premise. So the idea was we were really trying to consolidate each of them. So we had this idea of having mini teams. So each mini team was three people. So Bant was led by Brian Tinsman and then the rest of the team was Ken Nagel and myself. Esper was led by me and my team was Mark Globus and Mark Gottlieb. Yes, it was an all Mark Minutes.

team. Grixis was led by Devin Lowe with Eric Lauer and Brian Tinsman. John was led by Bill Rose, had Mark Globus and Mike Turian. And then Naya was led by Ken Nagel. It had me and Mike Turian. So you'll notice that a bunch

of people are on two teams. Brian Tinsman's on Bant and Grixus. Mike Turin's on John and Naya. Ken Nagel's on Bant and Nia. Mark Lobis is on Esper and and I was the only person who was on three teams. I was on Bant and Esper and Naya.

I was, of course, the head designer, so I was on an extra team. And so the idea of each of the teams is we tried to figure out what made it shine. So Bant was all about sort of order and it was a land of peace that, you know, knew no chaos or no, you know, there's no selfishness that, like, people were focused on the good of the group as a whole. And the mechanics that we came up for was ex-not ex-out, not ex-outed, it was exalted. Exalted, you have a number. And it says if you attack with only one creature, that creature gets plus N plus N, plus N,

where end is your number. So Exalted 1, you get plus 1 plus 1. Exalted 2, it gets plus 2 plus 2. I'll admit the first time Brian Tinsman was one that came up with this. I was a bit skeptical because I thought the hoop was too hard. The only attack with one creature was too much. It turns out actually Exalt is pretty good. we brought it back to me in a corset.

It's a fun mechanic. To my credit, once I played with it, I really liked it. But I was a bit skeptical when I first heard it. Esper, once again, was run by me, Mark Lobis, and Mark Gottlieb. So, Bant was Tinsman, Ken Nago and me. Esper, we really leaned into the idea of, it's a world of perfection. Well, if they're going to perfect things, why not themselves?

So they had this thing called Ethereum, and they were slowly replacing their bodies. They were sort of becoming, I don't know, cyborg is the right word, but they were becoming part mechanical because they were trying to improve themselves. Now, in, I had always planned to eventually do colored artifacts. In fact, in future site, there is an artifact that hints, I have a colored artifact on the future shifted sheet and future site. Sarkomite mirror. Interestingly, I was actually teasing about our return to mirroden.

In fact, that card teases that the phrexians are on Mirrenin, one of our little teases of what was coming forward. And I actually thought the place I was going to use colored artifacts was when Mirden became new Frexia. But when we were working on the Esper Mini thing, I realized that creatures that turn themselves sort of become partly artificial, it made sense for them to be artifact creatures. So all the creatures in the Esper Shard were artifact creatures. And plus, it also had a lot of other colored artifacts. So color artifacts was the theme. Not every shard had its own keyword. Bant and Grixus and John did, but Nya did not.

Grixis was led by Devin with Eric Lauer and Brian Tinsman. Interestingly, their mechanic, they were trying something. I think they had a mechanic that every time something died, it triggered. I forgot what they called it. We ended up doing a cycle of those cards, but there wasn't enough. It was too much to do a whole mechanic out of. And so I actually came up, even though I wasn't on the team, I had come up with unearth because I was trying to do a variant on flashback,

but for creatures. I think I originally called it Flash Dance of the Dead, my descriptive name, because there's a card called Dent of the Dead that was a reanimation card in Flash Dance, Flashback, obviously. So Grixus ended up using that. Grixus was a world where there is no life. There's only death,

and it's a world that's slowly eating all its resources. And so bringing things back from the dead was really important in that world. Jund was led by Bill and had Mark Lobis and Mike Turin. John to end up using devour. Devour's mechanic that says, when you enter, you can sack so many creatures, and the creature you are entering with gets bigger for every creature you eat.

And usually devour, I think devour might have a number, and then you get that many plus one plus one counters, I think is how it works. But anyway, Jun was a wild world where there was survival of the fittest and might makes right, where the largest things eat the smaller things. And then Naya, which was run by Ken Nagel and had me and Mike Turin on it. Ken Nagel and Mike Turin famously love green. That's why we were the green team.

And we ended up with a mechanic that was unnamed. It was basically power fiber grader. We would mess in the same space in later sets. Ferocious was four or higher in concerted here. But anyway, Naya was a world of unfettered growth, where everything gets bigger and bigger, and, you know, it's just, it's sort of nature gone wild. So anyway, we made those five, we made the five shards.

The one, in looking back with, you know, 20-20 hindsight, because this is done during the end of the process, I think we made each world uniquely its own. I do love the flavoring each world, and mechanically we did a good job of flavoring the world. What we didn't do is they don't really interlock well. Well, let's take it back. Exalted and the unnamed Power 5 mechanic was super synergistic.

But Esper, which covered artifacts and cared of artifacts, well, nobody else had artifacts. So, like, if you didn't have Esper stuff, the artifact creatures would go to Esper because Esper's one that really cared about them much of the time. But anyway, there could have been more synergy.

That was probably my biggest complaint about shards of O'Lara itself was while the shards were very flavorful and the flavor was very on point, it was not as interconnected as we like it to be. But anyway, let's get on the conflict. So that is Shards of O'Lara. We make shards of Alara.

So remember, Shards of Lara is three. They're shards, means the arcs, they're a color and two allies. We had never, we had not done three color in any volume before. Obviously, Legends with introduced multicolor had three color in it. And we had made the occasional three color card, but we had never made us that dedicated to three colors. So this was really big. The other thing I will say about Charzolara is, as we had never really done three color as a focal point for a set before, there's a lot of room for growth. We didn't really understand the mana correctly.

There's a lot of lessons about what to do at common. We've learned a lot about how to do three color sets since then. That was our first time trying it. Hey, when you try some first time, you make some mistakes. So looking back to Charger's a lot. There's a lot we did write that I really like, but there

definitely was some room for improvement, especially structurally. Okay, let's get to Conflux. So Conflux, Bill's idea of Conflux was, so the flavor of Conflux was, was Nicole Bolus, I believe, is responsible for bringing the sharps together. And he does it because he creates some amount of energy.

He is trying, ever since FutureSight, ever since Time Spiral Block, there was a great disaster that sort of reduced all the Plainswalkers. We wanted to depower them, so we made this cosmic event to sort of depower them all, so we started making cards out of them. and Nicole Bowles liked having power. So he's trying to get his power back. That's kind of Nicole Bulls' major theme in the recent, in relatively recent time.

And the whole Bullis arc is about him trying to get power back. Anyway, he was doing the conflicts because he was creating a great source of energy for him. It also happened to throw the shards together. I don't think he cared about that. But the idea was now the shards are intermingling. That's how we get to five-color.

So the idea is, so once again, February 6, 2009, Conflux came out, 145 cards, 60 commons, 40 uncommonds, 35 rairs, and 10 mythic rairs. So Charz O'Lara was a set that premiered mythic rare before that we had not done it, but we premiered mythic rare there. So this is the first small set. This set's name is paper because the block was rock, shards was rock, paper, and scissors. Lara were born a scissors. So rocked paper and scissors. This was paper. Like I said, Bill led the design team, Mike Turian, along with Graham Hopkins, Eric Lauer, and Devin Lowe.

That was the development team. So the, like I said, this was a five-color theme set, and it was focused on letting you play a lot of colors. Now, with retrospect, one of the challenges of playing a three-color environment is getting soup and making it four-and-five colors. So I don't know if we again would do a set where we're trying to get you to play five colors. I can see us doing something like invasion where you get some, like splashing more colors mean something. But conflict really was just trying to let you play

as many colors as you could. And one of the challenges with five color in general is if you can just play anything, why not play the best cards and everyone's just fighting over the same thing and then you get too much repetition of decks? The thing you really want that we've learned now with three color is really to make each three color

are really independent, so different decks are doing different things and prioritized different... In some level, Shards, a lot of, do prioritize different things, but a little too much so. I think Shards was... Now, since we were going to Five-Coward,

maybe that helped a little bit in retrospect. I don't think we're going to do a lot of another Five-Color set, is my guess. So anyway, all the mechanics came back. Exalted, colored artifacts, unearthed, Devour, Five-Power, all that came back. But,

there was something, I guess I wouldn't say new, something old. Okay, so when Richard Garfield first made magic, he had a whole bunch of playtasters. And in fact, the very first person he ever played magic with was his next-door neighbor, Barry Reich. So when all the different playtesters started building their own sets, the East Coast playtesters,

Scafellized Jim Lynn, Dave Paddy, Chris Page, they designed Ice 8, which, codenamed Ice Age. The Bridge Club troupe, the Bridge Club design team was Bill Rose, Joel Mick, Charlie Catino, Elliot Sego, Howard Collenberg, Don Felice.

They designed what would later be Mirage and Visions, code name at the time, Menagerie. And Barry Reich designed his own set, known as Spectral Chaos. Spectral Chaos at the time was planning to be the set that introduced multicolor. Multicolor, when Barry was making the set,

multicolored wasn't yet a thing. Legends obviously would design multicol, but that would design independent of Barry. So when we were working on Invasion, Bill really wanted to make use of whatever we could for Spectral Chaos. So Invasion wasn't Spectral Chaos, but it did borrow some cards

and one mechanic from Spectral Chaos. The mechanic it borrowed went unnamed in Invasion. We now know it's domain. Conflux would actually give it a name. And the idea of the domain mechanic is it's a scalable mechanic, meaning when you enter or when you activate, you do something, that thing is a scalable effect. And the scale is based on the number of basic land types you have.

So draw cards equal to the number of basic land types you have. So the idea is it's capped at 5. There's only five basic land types. And in Invasion, we encourage you to splash more colors. Because this was a five-color set, Bill felt it was a great time to bring domain back. And I think we'd always kind of regretted that we hadn't named it before. It's an ability word and not a keyword, but still, we could have named it as an ability word. So it got named domain.

So domain comes back. So returns for the first time since invasion. Like I said, so other than the... the shards of the lower mechanics, domain is the only thing that gets brought back. I'm sorry, domain is the only thing that gets added to the five mechanics that got brought back.

So let's talk a little bit about some of the key cards in the set. So we'll begin with conflicts. So I think this is the first time that the name of the set is on the name of a card in the set. I do know in Mirage, we had a card called Mirage, that we changed because we decided

we didn't want it to have the set. same name as a set name. It became like shimmering oasis or something. But this time we decided it was called conflicts because that was the events that smashed all the shards together. And so the idea was we would name it after that event and we wanted to make a card that

represent that event. So here's the card that represents the conflict itself. We want... Okay, so it's three white, blue, black, red, green. So it is eight-mane spell. One of each color plus three generic mana. It's a source search your library for a white card, a blue card, a black card, a red card, and a green card. That is five different cards, not one card. And then put it in your hand in shuffle.

And so the idea is you get to tutor for five different cards. And the way it works is you can not find parts of it. So if I can find a white card, not find a blue card. And if a card is multiple colors, I could choose, finding a white card just means it's white. me more than white. So if I want to go find a white blue card, I could find that for my white card, or I could find that for my blue card. But anyway, we wanted something big and splashy,

and the idea of, we had never done a tutor, got five cards before. And the idea of we wanted to reference all the colors, because we want to talk about all the colors coming together. So it is something, it is the kind of thing, a big splashy effect that we don't do a lot. We really don't do a lot with tutoring these days, a little tiny bit, but not five cards, usually. Okay. We also want to have an impressive creature.

So I think this is the only creature, I think, with this casting cost, manorcost. White, white, white, blue, blue, black, black, red, red, green, green. Yes, it is Wooberg twice. It's a legendary creature, a Hydra Avatar. It is a 10-10. And it has protection from everything. Also, if it ever goes to the graveyard, you shuffle into the library. That was to prevent shenanigans with you reanimating it rather than casting.

it. Interestingly, protection of everything is a funny story, which is Mark Gottlieb, who at the time was the rules manager, actually came up with protection from everything. Emerald, like, does that work? He goes, let me ask the rules manager. Yep. It works. Basically, the idea of protection from everything

is it just works against anything. So, it has, you know, nothing of any kind can target it. Nothing can damage it. Nothing can enchant it or equip it. Like, it's, the answer, is, does it protect against fill in the blank, the answer is yes, it does. We don't do a lot of protection from everything.

I think it's the only car protection from everything. But it was splashy and was big. Okay, next, Nicole Bowles, the main villain here. So we introduced Plainswalkers as a new car type in Lorwyn. There was a cycle of them, what we referred to as the Lorwyn-Five.

So it was it was a Johnny, Jace, Lilliana, Chandra, and Oh, Garrick, of course. And then we didn't do any more for the rest of that block. So Morning Tide, Shadowmore,

even tied, none of them. And then we had a couple in Shards O'Lara. Johnny is there, and Elspeth is there, and I think Sarkenball is there. But we saved one of them for conflicts, which is Nicole Ball is because he's the main, villain here who makes the conflicts happen.

It's also, in this point, we put one in the set and got a lot of attention. We're like, oh, maybe we start to putting, you know, so we, even though early on it was a sometimes thing, we quickly realized how much players like them, and we started making it that every set had at least one Plainswalker in it.

Okay, Nicole Bowles is four, blue, black, black, red. So, eight men a total, one of which is blue, two which is black, one is red, four generic. He's a Plainswalker, bolus, loyalty of five. For plus, Destroyed target non-creature permanent. Yes, plus three, he destroys the permanent of non-creature.

Minus two, he gains control of target creature. And then minus nine deal seven damage to target player. That player discards seven cards and sacrifices seven permanents. So Nicole Bowles first appeared in Legends. This is the effect that happens when Nicole Bowles hits you. So we repeated it. Interestingly, I actually designed this card. I designed everything but the ultimate.

The ultimate I designed is he took control of a player. It's an effect that I had made in Myriden, Mineslaver, and I thought it was perfect that he could destroy any non-creature, take control of any creature, and then he could take control of players because he's so persuasive and such. We ended up, they really liked doing the callback

to the cobales of the card. So that ability, that ultimate got pushed back to Sorin, I believe. But anyway, it was a Plainswalker. I mean, it's expensive Plainswalk, right? It's pretty powerful when you get it out. Okay, let's talk about a few other cards in the set. Font of Mists. It's an artifact that costs four generic mana and the beginning of the draw step, that player draws

two additional cards. So there was a card in Alpha called Howling Mine that basically everybody drew an extra card that was very popular and because of group hug decks where you're the one everyone loves because you're helping everybody Final Mythos

was just us sort of how in mind but more instead of one card everyone draws two cards Noble Highark Noble Hierarch was green as a creature human druid

01 it tapped for green white or blue and it has exalted I guess exalted doesn't have a number I guess exalted is just plus one plus one

I think there's a few cards that we wrote Exulted more than once on. So Exalted, Exalted is like Exalted, too. But we didn't write a number. Anyway, so this taps for mana, but only for the three colors of the band. It's a Bant card, basically. And the idea is it also is Exalted. So it's a card that you're not going to attack with it. You're going to use it for your mana.

But if you only attack with one creature, it pumps that creature up. And it's a pretty powerful card. Next is Ked-Frecked parasite. It costs one black. It's a creature. It's a horror for a 1-1. Whenever an opponent draws, if you have a red permanent, you deal one damage to them. So this is us because we're in multicol.

We're playing around. This is a mono-black card, but it makes reference to a red card. And so the idea is you can play it a mono-black, but if you're playing it where you have access to red, it starts to do damage. And really, I mean, this card wants to have red. But it's us playing around that space and doing things that care about other colors. Master Transmuter. Three in a blue, artifact creature, human artifices that are one, two.

Blue and tap, return an artifact you control in play to the battle... in play to your hand. And put an artifact from your hand onto the battlefield. Kind of the flavor is your transmuting from one thing into the other thing. Kind of the flavor. There was a card in antiquities, not antiquities.

Yeah, antiquities, called Transmute Artifact that I was a giant fan of. I would later try to fix it with a card in Erza Saga called Tinker, that I think the R&D is deemed my most broken card that I've designed, I believe. Anyway, this is me trying to sort of capture something like that, but not quite as broken as Tinker. This restricts you, I mean, it works on a creature, but it restricts you to your hand, so you only can sort of get an artifact from your hand,

so it doesn't just let you go go whatever you want under your... deck. Still pretty good card. Okay, now we get a land, ancient ziggurot. It's a land. You can tap for any color, but you can only use it to play creatures. This is a shape we like to do from time to time where the idea is giving people access to five color is a dangerous thing. We don't want to make soup. So one of the things we do sometimes is we have access to five color, but limit it. So you just can't play everything. That this card's really good in a very, a more narrow situation. Now this is a little less narrow than most because creatures is a little less narrow. But it's sort of the early, the early days of this kind of design. Okay, next,

relicatory tower. It's a land. You have no maximum hand size, and this taps for a colorless. So this was, so in Alpha, there's a card called Library of Lang. Library of Lang cost one. You, don't have a maximum hand size and whenever you had to discard a card you could choose instead to discard it to the top of your library. In Erza's was it legacy? I think it Erza's legacy. No, no, no, not. Sorry, in Exodus.

In Exodus, I made a card called Spell Book which was a zero-cross artifact that lets you have no hand size. The idea was make a cleaner version of Library Lang. I mean, Labor League prevented you from discard, obviously, but just make a part that did the no-hand size. size and because it just did that, we made it worth zero. That ended up being not worth enough to play the card, or I mean, some people played it.

So the idea is, well, what if we gave you land and types of colors that also does that? So it kind of is zero, but it has another functionality. And that is proven to be much more effective. And also, a lot of combo dexter decks that get a lot of cards in their hand. We'll use it so they don't have to discard. Anyway, Conflux, one of the interesting things that looking back, I think that there are a lot of bold ideas in this block. I think the idea of doing a three-color set

and then evolving it as the block went along, meaning like doing an evolving multicower set was really bold, and obviously at some point I'll get to a Lara Reborn, which was its own bold experiment. With 2020 hindsight, I think one of the challenging things about doing five-color sets in general is getting people to have identity but not just play soup is really hard. And giving you the lane you need to sort of play five-color, it is tricky. It's not that I don't think we'll ever have. I mean, we do make sets that have five-color archetypes to them, which means if you want to draft five-colors, we'll give you a way to do it.

Normally we do a five-car archetype, though, we're really limiting what you're doing. The tools we're giving you are, they're useful in a very narrow space. So if you want to play five-color, there's something guiding you that's not just play all the best cards. Because five-color soup where it's just, you know, the best cards is not particularly interesting. And it also causes limited issues and such. So looking back, I mean, one of the things I find interesting is I'm always happy that we try things to experiment with them. I think that I think the Shards of Alara Block

was a very bold experiment I think there's a lot of cool things that came out of it I think the creative and the shard worlds were really interesting I think just the color identities of

and the mechanical identities of the shards were really interesting so I I appreciate sort of what we were up to what we were trying but looking back

I think of the Shards Block as Noble and a lot lot of ways with a lot of cool things in it, but some fundamentals, I mean, I'll get into the all-old gold set when I do a lot of Reborn. That has its own thing. But Conflux has the five-color set. I, like I said, I don't anticipate us doing another five-color set. I think we'll do sets that have a five-color component, meaning I think there'll be drafts where you can't draft five-color if you're doing a very specific thing. But the idea of everybody play all the colors doesn't actually play out quite as well as we like. But anyway,

that is Conflux. I mean, it definitely has done with a lot of cool cards, and I look back on it finally, I remember many of the mini teams and such. Anyway, guys, I'm at work. So that is my talk on Conflux today. So since I'm at work, we all know what that means. It means it's the end of my drive to work.

So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to make it magic. So I hope you guys enjoyed the look back, and I'll see you next time.