Theros (when it first came out) was a very interesting set concept. With focus on enchantments for the block, I sort of had high hopes for how things would turn out. The first set was a fun one for that initial draft and still has some gems to it. My personal favorites of the set are probably still Curse of Swine and Shipbreaker Kraken, and I normally don't run blue (nothing against it, but for most of my MtG experience I was usually white/green/black with a splash of blue and red over the years). Voyaging Satyr is an all around great card as well. But enough about silly things in blue, I suppose I should go on about the set as a whole. Let us talk first about enchantments.
The "Ordeal" set was a fairly solid set of enchantments, for commons. Typical abilities for their color scheme; black discards two, blue is draw, white is life gain, green ramps lands, and red deals damage. The green and white ones though were quite easily abused thanks to the new heroic mechanic on cards like Fabled Hero as the ordeals did not care about how the counters got on the creature but that they existed when it declared attack (which the red one could also be abused if you felt like it as it timed before the declare blockers step, getting rid of something that could have blocked if you feel like it). The remaining colors, such as blue with Meletis Astronomer, were a little harder to abuse if your goal is to trigger the ordeals, as opposed to the card's heroic ability.
Speaking of enchantments, bestow was an interesting mechanic that I feel should come back at some point, though maybe we should next see it on artifact creatures that can act as equipment? Basically, they had enchantment creatures like Cavern Lampad that, instead of paying their lower normal mana cost, you could pay the bestow and equip it onto a creature as if it were an aura (enchant creature for us old folk). That part everyone at the prerelease understood. Only two people seemed to understand (and one was the judge) that if what it is attached to goes to the grave it falls off and becomes a creature as if normally cast. The one exception to this rule is if it happens to be coming into play as it was bestowed and the target it would attach to isn't there anymore (died, exiled, bounced) then it just goes to the grave, as it was failed to cast. That might have affected the actual rankings of the tournament elsewhere but eh, we were there for the exposure to new shiny things.
Speaking of enchantment creatures, I'll double down with both gods (new creature type) and devotion.
Basically, they were considered not to be creatures as long as the combined mana symbols on all permanents you owned (including them) didn't add up to 5 of their color (for the "main" five mono-colored gods). This also made one of my long time favorite cards, Mistform Ultimus, achieve his final goal to take over the world. Probably the one considered the universal best of the five would be Thassa, since it is the cheapest and it is one of the cards that have the brought back scry mechanic (look at the top x cards, put any of them back in any order on top and/or on bottom). Making things unable to be blocked did not hurt either. Purphoros and Erebos are the next two I usually hear about in potentially brutal combos.
Last up is monstrosity, which is another mechanic I hope someday returns. Nessian Asp is a solid example of a good card for this. Basically monstrosity is an activated ability. You can activate it as many times as you want but it only works once while it is on the field. Nessian Asp is normally a 4/5 with reach for 5, however if you pay the cost (7 in this case) you put a number of +1/+1 counters equal to the number on it, and if it has an additional ability (like the long ago mentioned Kraken in the beginning) then that triggers as well, and it becomes monstrous (meaning if you pay the cost again, or have the ability on the stack already, it has no effect). Colossus of Akros is a good example of a creature with it that gains and loses an ability when it becomes monstrous. Monstrosity is probably the easiest new mechanic to get down for this set along with devotion.
My overall score for the first set, Theros, comes to a solid 11/10, as at the time it did outdo my expectations and is a very solid set.
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