The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

Shards of Alara is the forty-seventh Magic expansion and was released October 2008 as the first set in the Alara block.

Alara was a single plane once, a massive world rich with mana. However, those same resources led to its downfall, for an unknown planeswalker tore the plane asunder millennia ago, harvesting it of its mana. This disaster broke Alara along color lines into incomplete planes called shards, as light is diffracted by a prism. The shards recovered their mana in time, but only in part. Each shard is vastly different, as the combinations of triple-colored mana have shaped natural and cultural forces on each world in distinctive ways.

Before the Conflux, the rare Alaran vampires were exclusively found on the shard of Grixis, where they fed on zombies. Grixian vampires range in their strength from the amount of vis they have consumed. Those who only managed to wring lifeforce from corpses are skeletal and mad with hunger, while those who managed to taste vis from the still-living soar in the skies, commanding hordes of bats and other vermin. These vampires knew that their life on Grixis ran on borrowed time and held annual meetings to discuss how to prolong their race's survival.

After Grixis rejoined with the rest of the plane, vampires were known to be seen flying over neighboring lands like Jund.