We will discuss the basic first order formalism that captures the flow of moduli and the dynamics of the metric in the presence of a black attractor- with a brief review of black hole systems in flat space to introduce the formalism, we will then go on to exploit the full machinery of this formalism to study black branes in the presence of fluxes in an $N=2$ SUSY setup. (Based on work with S. Barisch, G. Cardoso, M. Haack and N. Obers)