How many cards are in Alara Reborn?

Alara Reborn contains 145 cards. It is the third and final set in the Alara block and was released on April 30, 2009.

Is every card in Alara Reborn multicoloured?

Yes — Alara Reborn is notable for being the first Magic set where every single card is multicoloured (gold). There are no mono-colour cards, colourless cards, or basic lands in the main set. Only two reprints appear in the set, both originally from Planeshift.

What is the cascade mechanic introduced in Alara Reborn?

Cascade is a triggered ability that fires when you cast the spell. You exile cards from the top of your library one at a time until you find a card with a lesser mana value, then cast it for free. It's one of the most impactful mechanics Alara Reborn introduced, and it has had significant competitive implications in formats like Modern.

What block is Alara Reborn part of?

Alara Reborn is the third set in the Alara block, following Shards of Alara (2008) and Conflux (2009). All three sets are set on the plane of Alara and together tell the story of the Conflux — the violent reunification of Alara's five shattered shards.

What formats is Alara Reborn legal in?

Alara Reborn is legal in Legacy and Vintage. It has rotated out of Standard and is not a Pioneer-legal set. Individual cards may be legal in Modern or other formats if they were reprinted in a set that is legal in those formats.

Who is the main villain in the Alara Reborn story?

Nicol Bolas, one of Magic's elder dragon Planeswalkers, is the central antagonist. He engineered the Conflux — the merging of Alara's five shards — to harvest the massive surge of mana it would produce. The full story is told in the novel Alara Unbroken by Doug Beyer, published in May 2009.

Alara Reborn: The All-Multicolour Set Guide

Some sets try to do a lot of things. Alara Reborn tries to do one thing, completely: every single card in the set is multicoloured. Not most cards. Not the rares and mythics. Every card. That design commitment - unprecedented in Magic's history up to that point - is what makes Alara Reborn one of the most distinctive sets ever printed.

What is Alara Reborn?

Alara Reborn is the third and final set in the Alara block, following Shards of Alara (2008) and Conflux (2009). It's Magic's 49th expansion, containing 145 cards. Prerelease events took place on April 25-26, 2009, with the set going on sale on April 30, 2009 - one day earlier than originally scheduled, due to the May Day holiday falling on May 1.

The set rounds out the story of Alara, a plane that had been shattered into five monocolour shards and was now being violently reunified. That reunion - the Conflux - is reflected directly in the cards themselves: every spell in the set crosses at least two colours, forcing you to think across shard boundaries.

Format check: Alara Reborn is a legal set in Legacy and Vintage. The full Alara block rotated out of Standard long ago, and the individual cards are not legal in Pioneer or Modern unless they were later reprinted in a legal set.

Themes and mechanics

The defining mechanical identity of Alara Reborn is simple to state and genuinely radical in practice: every card is a gold card. Hybrid cards count, but the point stands - you will not find a single basic land, colourless artifact, or mono-colour spell in the main set. This was a first for Magic, and it hasn't been repeated since at the same scale.

Beyond that core concept, the set introduced and returned several mechanics tied to the five shards of Alara:

Cascade - one of the set's most impactful mechanics, appearing across several colours. When you cast a spell with cascade, you exile cards from the top of your library until you find one with a lesser mana cost, then cast it for free. It's a powerful and sometimes chaotic ability that rewards careful deckbuilding.
Exalted - returning from Shards of Alara, rewarding players for attacking with a single creature by giving it a bonus for each exalted trigger.
Unearth - also returning, letting you pay a cost to bring a creature back from the graveyard temporarily, with haste.
Devour - another returning mechanic from Shards, letting creatures eat other creatures as they enter the battlefield to grow larger.
Cycling and other minor returning abilities round out the set's toolkit.

Cascade deserves special attention here. It's the kind of mechanic that looks fun and splashy on the surface - and it is - but it also has a ceiling of raw power that turned out to be quite high. The set's cascade spells became format staples and, in some cases, format problems.

Limited and Draft

Drafting Alara Reborn was unusual because it was always drafted as part of the full Alara block - typically two packs of Shards of Alara and one of Alara Reborn, or some variation. The all-multicolour constraint of the Alara Reborn pack meant you were constantly making decisions about which two-, three-, or even five-colour combinations you could support.

The format rewarded players who built coherent mana bases across the block's five shards. Splash too many colours and your mana falls apart; stay too narrow and you miss the most powerful cards in the Alara Reborn pack. It's a format that pushed deckbuilding skill hard, which made it well-regarded among players who enjoy that kind of puzzle.

Cascade in Limited was every bit as exciting as it looks - hitting a free spell off your six-drop felt great, and drafting around the mechanic was a real and rewarding strategy.

Notable cards and impact

Cascade is where Alara Reborn made its biggest competitive mark. Several cascade spells from the set went on to significant tournament careers, and cascade as a mechanic was eventually banned in certain contexts in Modern - a sign of just how much design space the ability opened up (and occasionally broke).

The set contains only two reprints, and both originally appeared in Planeshift - another set themed around planes being merged together by an antagonistic force. That's a piece of trivia that feels almost too perfect: the designers reached back to the one previous set with a structurally similar premise when choosing what to bring back.

Lore and setting

Alara Reborn takes place on the plane of Alara at the moment the Conflux reaches its peak - the five shards crashing back together after millennia of separation. The central antagonist driving this catastrophe is Nicol Bolas, one of Magic's oldest and most powerful elder dragons, who engineered the Conflux to harvest the enormous surge of mana it would release.

The block's novelisation, Alara Unbroken by Doug Beyer (May 2009), covers the full arc of all three sets. It features a wide cast of characters caught up in the chaos: Ajani Goldmane, Elspeth Tirel, Sarkhan Vol, Rafiq, Kresh, Malfegor, and Bolas himself, among others. The story is a collision of cultures and creatures who had never encountered each other before - the soldiers of Bant meeting the undead of Grixis, the beast-shamans of Jund confronting the sphinxes of Esper.

The plane's reunification is violent and strange, which is exactly what the all-multicolour card set reflects. Every card is a meeting point between what were once separate worlds.

Set legacy

Alara Reborn is remembered for two things above all else: the all-gold gimmick and cascade. The former is a genuine design landmark - a set with a single mechanical concept baked into every card is a bold statement, and it works because the Alara block had spent two full sets establishing the colour identities that the gold cards could then bridge.

Cascade's legacy is more complicated. It's a beloved mechanic for casual and Commander play, generating excitement and variance in a way that feels fun. In higher-powered formats, it's caused headaches - the interaction between cascade and spells with alternative casting costs in particular became a significant rules and balance issue in Modern years after the set's release.

Alara Reborn is also a quiet reminder that the best thematic design doesn't just tell a story in the flavour text - it embeds the story in the rules themselves. A plane being torn apart and put back together, card by card, colour by colour. That's what this set is.