Conflux (CON): MTG Set Guide
What is Conflux?
Conflux (CON) is the second set in the Alara block, released February 6, 2009, making it the forty-eighth Magic: The Gathering expansion overall. Prerelease events ran January 31-February 1, 2009, with launch parties following February 6-8. The set contains 145 cards.
It sits between Shards of Alara (2008) and Alara Reborn (2009) in the block, and its whole reason for existing is right there in the name: the five shards of Alara - Bant, Esper, Grixis, Jund, and Naya - are crashing back together after millennia of separation. That's a genuinely dramatic setup, and the set's mechanics and themes follow directly from it.
Lore and setting
The five shards reunite
Alara was once a single plane, but an ancient catastrophe split it into five isolated shards, each starved of the three colors of mana it lost. Bant knew no black or red. Grixis had forgotten green and white. Each shard developed its own culture, creatures, and magic in isolation.
The Conflux is the name for the moment - and the process - of those shards slamming back together. Mountains, forests, and entire civilizations begin bleeding into one another. Creatures from one shard encounter things they have no framework to understand. It's an event on a world-shaking scale, and the story treats it that way.
Lore aside: The card Planar Nexus is directly associated with the Conflux event in the lore, representing the convergence point where the shards meet. Maelstrom Pulse and Shardless Outlander are among the cards that reference the chaos of the merging shards in their flavor.
A plane remade
The theological and political fallout matters too. The Conflux wasn't random - it was engineered, and the story of who engineered it and why runs through the entire Alara block. By the time Conflux resolves into Alara Reborn, the plane will never look the same again.
Themes and mechanics
Five colors colliding
If Shards of Alara was a set about separation - five distinct three-color wedges living apart - then Conflux is about collision. The mechanical identity of the set leans hard into five-color play and the chaos of shards bleeding into one another.
The domain mechanic returns here, rewarding players for controlling lands of all five basic land types. Domain cards scale with how many different basic land types you have in play, so a fully assembled five-color mana base unlocks their full power. It's a clean mechanical expression of the lore: the more of Alara you've unified, the stronger you become.
Basic land types (Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, Forest) are what domain counts - not the number of lands, and not the number of colors produced. Fetch lands and dual lands with basic land types count for domain even if you only have a handful of lands in play.
Five-color matters
Beyond domain, Conflux features cards that explicitly care about all five colors of mana or reward you for casting spells across the color pie. This pushed Limited players toward greedy, ambitious mana bases and gave Constructed players tools to build true five-color decks - something that had always been a fun corner of the game but rarely had this much direct support in a single set.
Limited and Draft
Drafting across the shards
Conflux drafts as the middle pack in an Alara block draft (typically Shards of Alara / Conflux / Alara Reborn), which means the archetypes you establish in pack one carry into Conflux's pack. The set rewards players who are willing to stretch their mana - domain cards get dramatically better when you've built a greedy base, and the five-color payoffs in Conflux push in the same direction.
Draft formats from this era are harder to evaluate today since they aren't widely supported on Arena or Magic Online in the way newer sets are, but the general shape of Alara block Limited was midrange-to-slow, with powerful bombs and a premium on mana fixing.
Format check: Conflux is not available in current Standard, Pioneer, or Modern. It's legal in Legacy and Vintage, though few cards from the set see competitive play in those formats.
Notable cards and impact
The source material available here doesn't call out specific Conflux cards as format staples or meta-defining in detail, so I'd rather not speculate and name the wrong ones. What I can say is that the set's five-color and domain themes produced cards that showed up in big-mana and five-color Constructed strategies of the era, and a handful of cards from the Alara block overall left lasting impressions - Maelstrom Pulse, referenced in connection with Conflux's lore, became a Modern staple for years after rotation.
If you're looking to dig into specific card evaluations, Scryfall's CON set page is the cleanest way to browse the full 145-card list.
Set legacy
Conflux occupies an interesting place in Magic history. It's the set where a genuinely ambitious world-design experiment - splitting a plane into five isolated shards - pays off dramatically, with everything crashing together at once. The domain mechanic gave the set a clear mechanical identity, and the five-color themes felt earned by the lore rather than bolted on.
As a middle set in a three-set block (a structure Wizards has since moved away from entirely), Conflux did what good middle sets do: escalated the stakes, introduced new tools, and set up the finale. Alara Reborn, the third set, would take the five-color collision even further - going so far as to make every single card in that set multicolored. Conflux planted the seeds for that.
It's not a set that dominates conversations about the most powerful or format-warping releases in Magic's history, but for players who were there in 2009, the image of five worlds colliding - and the chaos that followed at the Draft table - is a genuinely memorable piece of the game's past.
