Theros Block: Part the Second

After the entertaining set that was Theros, I was hoping to see some good things out of Born of the Gods, but alas, as a whole, the set didn't live up to that personal hype.

Inspired was a cool mechanic, in theory.  The only problem was to use it effectively you needed two conditions:  A) Tap your creature and B) Untap a still living creature.  In a limited format, this is somewhat easy, as Deepwater Hypnotist is a better card than I first thought if your opponent chooses to make a poor early choice, effectively keeping itself alive.  But in a more....planned format you basically need to rely on tap effects or tap costs under most situations.  This made it a lot less desirable.  Then again, we saw a Springleaf Drum reprint for this so.......I'm not one to judge beyond that.

Tribute was another introduced mechanic, although this was a bit cooler and well done.  Take Oracle of Bones for example.  Either you deal with a 5/3 haste Minotaur, or you let it be a 3/1 and possibly take a Bolt of Keranos to the face, or worse, Fated Return.  (On a side note, the Fated cycle were interesting, but maybe could have been handled a tiny bit better.)

Once again they bring us more enchantment creatures, and bestow, but not on the same card.  Meet the bane of EDH for this one, and the reason why I'm/we're no longer allowed to do 4 man Bant vs Bant, Perplexing Chimera.

I don't often intend to post full cards in summaries like this, at least for more recent sets, but this card was made to cause glorious chaos.  I'm tempted to use this and Kiki-Jiki for some high level shenanigans.  The only downside of creatures like these comes to adding another way to get rid of them (i.e. enchantment hate).  Getting back on topic though we also got the rather entertaining Archetype cycle, which I like the call the "no one is allowed to have nice things" cycle.  No to trample, first strike, flying, hex proof or death touch, just not allowed to have them.  They're more worth to have in a deck to deny the benefits they give, although the benefits are nice indeed.

      Scry returned, devotion and gods returned, but this time with 7 devotion requirements and no enchantment artifact cycle.  Due to the multiple color requirement they were easier/harder to get out.  As you may have noticed this (seems to me anyway) is shorter than the first part, one because fewer new things to explain, and two smaller set.