Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1335: Born of the Gods

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

This is another in my quest to do an episode on every Magic set release. This one is about the design of Born of the Gods, the second set in the Theros block.

I'm pulling out of my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so this is another of my podcast and my ongoing quest to talk about every magic expansion. So I'm going to today talk about Born of the Gods, which was the second set in the Theros block. So first, let me do a little bit of explanation on how we got to the Theros block.

I have done podcasts on Theros, so you can go listen to those specifically. But let me give you a little bit of a little bit. a little larger context. So, the original idea for this black action was not ancient Greece, or inspired by ancient Greece. It was, in fact, a world. The original idea I pitched was I wanted

to do a prehistoric set, and then I wanted to jump thousands of years ahead of time to go to, like, a medieval-ish type set, and then jump another couple thousand years ahead of time and being the most futuristic thing magic has done. The idea was it was a world

where we see it, at three completely different points in its evolution. That was the idea. And pretty close, like I pitched it. We sort of got rough sign off on it. And then very close to us starting it, Brady Dobramith, who was the head of the creative team at the time, said, because look, we can't do this.

This is just three worlds. We are not equipped to do three worlds. And so he said, how about, and he pitched the idea of us doing an Egyptian mythology set, not Egyptian, a Greek mythology set. So we had talked about doing Greek mythology forever. It had been one of those ideas that kept getting bounced around. And I think Brady pitched the idea of it both being a Greek mythology set and it being an enchantment set.

That's the two ideas that Brady had pitched. And so we actually, I really latched on to that idea of, you know, one early on, I remember I was doing some research, and I found a book called God's Heroes and Monsters. And it was all like Greek mythology for kids. And I liked the idea that what became the sort of the center point of the structure. structure. One of the things I realized was that there were three big components of Greek mythology. There were the gods, obviously, definitional. There were the heroes of the stories. And there were the monsters that the gods and the heroes fought. So early on, the idea that the enchantments

represented the touch of the gods. And that in order to do an enchantment set, one of the challenges about making something matter is you need enough as-fan for it to care about. And so the trick with enchantments was, well, we just need to make some enchantment creatures. And that meant we needed an excuse what are our enchantment creatures. And we decided, well, these are the creations of the gods. The gods themselves are enchantment creatures, and the creatures they create are enchantment creatures. And so we then sort of did that. Oh, another thing was we wanted this sense, we really the idea of devotion, of caring about your commitment to the God. And we actually, so there's a mechanic we had made long before called

Chroma that was an even tide actually it first showed up it was on the future shifted sheet in future site and then a year later we had to show up we named it Chroma I had high hopes for chroma it ended up not doing as well as I hoped and we realized that maybe we just

didn't do it as right as we could and so devotion was our redoing of chroma and the idea was Chroma was go look anywhere we'll tell you where to look count up man of pips you know colored manna pips and then we'll tell you what happens. So devotion was, okay, we're only going to

count those in play. And the problem with the promo was, I mean, some of the designs weren't great and the power level wasn't wonderful, but from a design, not power level standpoint, it just was all over the place. That if I had a car, let's say I had a green

card that counted pips in my hand and the one that kind of pips in my graveyard and one that kind of pips in play, it's like, but you didn't play those in the same deck necessarily. But devotion said, look, we're just counting things and play. So all of a sudden, they started working together, at least ones of the same color, worked together. In a way that was, you know, it, I mean, devotion in some ways is kind of the signpost, the poster child of how to fix a mechanic. Because we had a mechanic that really

was a cool idea that just didn't go over well. And all we need to do is give it some flavor, give it some cohesion, and, you know, and give it some power. And all of a sudden becomes, you know, a favorite mechanic. For the heroes, we had introduced the mechanic. called heroic. Heroic was whenever on the target of a spell, something happens. And different colors, like green tend to get plus one plus one counters and just different spell effects would happen when you target it. And then for the monsters, we did monstrosity, which was an activated ability, a one-time activated ability that put counters on it and made it bigger. The idea is the monster could grow over time. Oh, another big thing that became really important for original

Theros was I liked this idea of adventure and of evolution of over time things got more powerful. Oh, so one of the things I did mention is one of the other mechanics that we tied to the gods. I said the gods were all about enchantments. We made a mechanic called...

What was a mechanic called? It was called bestow. Bestow were enchanting creatures that you could pay a different cost to make it an aura, usually cheaper than the creature. So you could make it a creature or you can make it an aura. And then, oh, right, sorry.

It was more expensive to make an aura, I think. But if the creature died while the aura, the aura fell off and became a creature, was the idea. So anyway, that allowed us to both have more creatures that, you know, more enchantments in the deck, and allowed us to make

oras that also functioned as creatures. Like, one of the challenges with oras in general is, if I draw an aura and it doesn't have any creatures, it's a dead card in my hand. But bestow is nice because, well, if I don't draw another, you know, if I draw bestow, well, I can just play it as a creature. I draw a second bestow, well, I could play that as a creature, or I could bestow my first creature. I could enchant my first creature. So anyway, in Theros, devotion, bestow, heroic monstrosity. Oh, and Scry at the time was not evergreen.

We'd introduce Scry in Fifth Dawn, the fifth set of fifth set, the third set of the original Mirrenum block. And there's a real popular mechanic, and Scrying fits so thematically in the ancient Greece. There's a lot of omens and soothsayers, and so we brought Breck Scribe. All of those would get taken to Born of the Gods. There's one exception. For some reason, we decided to stop doing monstrosity. I'm not sure why. It's a really good mechanic.

And something that we had never done before is we stopped doing it for Born of the Gods and then realize a mistake and start doing again for the Thirst that was a journey to Nix. So anyway, a quirky little trivia thing there. Okay, let's talk a little bit more than the gods, now that I've set up Theris to us. So there's 165 cards. This was a small set, as we called it back in the day. 60 commons, 60 Uncomins, 35 rairs and 10 mythic rairs.

The set came out in February 7, 2014. Ken Nagel was the lead designer of the set. Ethan Fleischer, Billy Moreno, Ryan Spain and myself, for the design team. Tom Lippili was the lead developer of the set, along with Chris Dupree, Mark Gottlieb,

Dave Humphreys, and Billy Moreno. Jeremy Jarvis was our art director. So there were two brand mechanics in the set. So just to give you a little context, we are well, well into block design,

and we're forever trying to solve what we called the third block problem, which was we would do a first set and we get to the second set and you know people didn't like as much as the first set but they were still on board and then by the third

set people were like what are we doing here or why are we still here just it was so hard to keep momentum up for the third set so for this block I tried something different I took the thing that I knew players most wanted which was what we call

constellation the idea of caring about when you play in Chapman's and I held on to it for the third set and said, I'm going to keep something I know players really want and I'm not going to give it to them to the third set. And what ended up happening is kind of the second set ended up feeling more like the third set than the third set did. But anyway, Born of the Gods definitely from a...

It's one of the sets, which is interesting, in that I think the second set performed, I think, maybe worse than the third set, which didn't normally happen. Normally, the way that sets usually worked was the first set, If it was at 100%, the second set would be 80%, and the third set would be 60%, just no matter how it worked.

And I think Born of the Gods might be one of the few, if only examples, where the middle set didn't sell as well as the third set. But anyway, so a lot of what we did in Born of the Gods was continue what we had done in Theros. It truly was a second set. We did add two mechanics. So let's walk through those two mechanics.

First is inspired. This is a keyword, not keyword, actually. This is an ability word. inspired basically says when this untapped trigger so you would put it all it usually went on creatures and the idea is okay well how do I

how do I tap this so that I can untape it the most obvious way obviously was to attack with it because you attack with a creature you tap it but there were other ways in the set like we had springleaf drum was repeated in the set there were other ways that you tap your creature so the other trick

was use other ways to tap your creatures and then when they untap they trigger and they something. The other building was called tribute. Tribute was a key word. It would say tribute N, and would be a number. And so tribute one, tribute two. And the way it worked is when the creature entered, your opponent had a choice. They could either put that many plus one plus one counters on the creature equal to its tribute cost, or they could allow an effect to happen. And so the idea was, okay, well, what do you want? Do you want to let me do thing X or make my creature bigger. But the idea

was this was up to the opponent. You choose the opponent, it's more than one. Up to the opponent to decide. Inspired went over a little bit better than tribute. Tribute wasn't particularly popular. In fact, I believe it was one of the lower-rated mechanics we've had. Inspire did okay,

not great. Neither of the new mechanics were particularly... In general, devotion was very, very popular and monstrosity was pretty popular, bestow and heroic were somewhat popular not as popular as the first two.

And everyone like scribe. So anyway, so I'm going to walk through some of the cards. And as I walk through the cards, I can talk through some of the things we did with us that. Okay, first up, Temple of Enlightenment, Temple of Malice, and Temple of Plenty. So one of the things we did in the block

is we did a bunch of ten card cycles, meaning we did all 10 two-color pairs, but we would break them up through the sets. So I think from a lands we went 4333. So Temple of Lightman is white-blue, Temple of Malice is black-red, Temple Plenty is green-white. So all five colors get hit.

These are the Scry lands, meaning they enter tapped, and they tap for two collars, but when they enter you, Scrii 1. One of the things we realize is that Tapped, just had room for a little bit more to do with them. And so we've found other things to do with them. Since Scry was being brought back here, we like the idea of the Scrylands.

And these definitely saw some play. Okay, next up, Cursor of Crucler. Courser of Crucifix. One green green for a two-four. It's an enchantment creature, centaur. And by the way, all of our enchantments had a special frame for, this block. That frame

would go on later to become the enchantment frame, but it sort of had sparkly nix is part of the part of Theros, and it had a sparkly sky, so the enchantments had this sparkly nix frame to them. Anyway, Coursle of Crucifix is a two-four for one green-green

it lets you play with the top card of your library revealed and you may play the top card of your library if it's a land. You may play lands on the top of your library. And then I had what was essentially landfall. It wasn't, the original time, it's now landfall in Oracle,

but it wasn't landfall written on the card at the time. You gain one life whenever land enters under your control. So the idea essentially is it lets you play land off top of your library and you gain extra life when you play land. It is a popular card. Yeah, basically, so I think the first version is a card called FutureSight, which we later would name a whole set after. So FutureSight lets you look at the top card of your library

and then play cards off the top of your library. We realized that was fun space, and we've done a lot of sort of slicing of it, of saying, okay, you can look at the top card of your library, and you then can play this subset of card from it. And that subset here is lands. We've done all sorts of things. It's pretty fun,

and as long as it stays within the subset of what that color has access to, we can spread it around a little bit. Obviously, green is king of land, so laying it do lands is fine. Okay, next, Xenegos, three red green. It's a legendary enchantment creature, God, a six-three. So it is indestructible.

It is not a creature, so it's an enchantment creature, but it's not a creature if you don't have devotion. If you have devotion to seven or less, it's not a creature. So you need devotion, and when I say devotion, to red and green, because it's a red-green creature. So devotion to red and green. And then at beginning of your combat, another creature you control gains haste and gets plus X plus X where X is its power.

So the idea is it makes things bigger. So real quickly, this is one of the gods. Let's talk a little bit about the gods. When we first made Theros, one of the things we realized is we like to take the color pie and we like to sort of build the world through the color pie. And so one of the things is that, well, what's definitional for a Greek mythology world? the pantheon of the gods. That was pretty important.

So what we did was we made the gods, and what we did is we made 15 gods. We made a god for each singular color, and those were in the main set in Theros. Then we made a god for the five ally colors, those were in Born of the Gods, and then we made gods for the enemy colors, and those were in Journey to Nix.

So the idea is we did the whole pantheon. All the gods followed the following structure. They're enchantment creature of God, They have different power top, and that could vary. And their cost could vary. Unless you have a devotion, I think it was devotion, the monocular creatures, I think was devotion five. You had to have devotion five to turn them into creatures.

And I believe the alien enemy was seven. But maybe I'm misremembering the monocolor. Maybe that was seven. I don't have that in front of me. But the idea essentially was that it's an enchantment until you have enough devotion, and then the God comes and takes form, and you have the God.

But it allowed us to make a very powerful creature that, well, it doesn't start as a creature. You have to build up and get to it. You have to build toward the creature. And then, so the monocolor ones only care about their own color devotion. The enemy and ally ones care about both colors. So when I say devotion are red and green,

it counts all your red pips and all your green pips. So the idea is, if I'm playing Heliod, who's the white god. Well, I want a mono-white deck because I need as much white as possible. It must have been probably still seven. Anyway, but if I want to play this god, Zinogos, for example, it's red and green.

So that means you can play it in a red and green deck. Oh, Zena-Gose, by the way, so Zena-Gos actually shows up in the very first set. He is a plainswalker in the very first set. But then, through shenanigans, he becomes a god. And so anyway, one of the fun progressions in the set. He actually, there was a red-green god before him that something happened to them. We later learned about them when we turned to Therisbeon Death, we learned about them.

But there was a vacancy, and he sort of managed to ascend to godhood. Okay, next. Astral cornucopia. It has a manacost of X, X, X. And I know we've done artifacts before with XX, but I think this might be the first one. maybe the only one with XXXX. So it is obviously an artifact. So when it enters, you put on X charge counters on it.

So basically a third of what you paid for it. And then whenever you tap it, you can choose a color and produce that much color based on how much charge cards are on it. So essentially, you pay for it in the power of three. If I pay for with three, I get one counter. Six, I get two counters. nine, I get three counters. Twelve, I get four counters.

So the idea is the more I put into it, the more mana I get out of it. I believe it is used in decks that get a lot of mana and then use it to make even more mana. Okay, Kiora's followers, green blue, it's a Murphoke. It's a two-two. And it simply has the ability to tap, untap another permanent. Blue and green both can untapped things. And so combining them makes it very efficient.

creature. The nice thing about it is you can use it for mana when you need to because you can untape a land, but you also can untap a creature for blocking or to be able to reuse its tapability or reuse an artifact for example. There are, uh, the set is not what I would call a gold set, but there are definitely some gold cards in the set. The gods obviously talked about, but there are other gold cards in the set. Sater Wayfinder, one in a green for a one-one creature. It's a Sater. When it enters, you reveal the top four cards of your library. If one of them is a land, you may put it in your hand,

and then the rest of the cards, all the cards that you don't reveal, because you can reveal a land. Anything you don't reveal, you put on the bottom in a random order. And by the way, so this is a trend, the early part of our trend. We've been trying to do, for many years. One of the things we learned when we did testing is that shuffling, actually is a big barrier that not a lot of people necessarily are good at shuffling. And we first start playing magic, one of the most intimidating things of all the things,

and there's plenty to be intimidated. One of the most intimidating things is shuffling. And even then, even among established magic players, there's still a lot of people just aren't good at shuffling. On top of that, shuffling just takes time. You know, like, it's just a big deal, especially when you're shuffling in that commander. We have a giant deck. So we've been trying to lessen how much.

much shuffling we're doing. Not none because there's effects we like that require you to shuffle. So it's not we never do shuffling, but we've been trying to figure out less weight. So this is a good example of us trying to say, okay, we want you to get a land, but we don't want you to shuffle. How do we do that? So one of the tricks is basically what we call impulsing based on the first spell that did it, is looking at the top end cards of your library for something specific. And then if you find that thing, you can put it in your hand. So one One of the nice things about this, besides not shuffling, is it does something really beneficial, which is, if I say you can search your whole library for something, well, you only need

one of them in your library. In fact, you're kind of, you know, it lets you sort of say, oh, well, I just want to search for this one thing, so I'll just put one in. But if we say, look at the top end card to your library, if you don't have density of that thing, you won't find it. So it really encourages you to say, well, if you build your deck toward this, you can find it. And lands are obvious because you play for it. 100% land.

But the idea essentially is it's a nice way to sort of do something that has a search. And it has a randomization, like, you don't know what lane you're going to get. You're going to get all land. So it also, one of the things with tutoring in general is it just makes games play out the same because you always go get the exact same thing. And with Impulsing, you don't quite know what you're going to get. And it kind of encourages you to sort of, if you want to play a theme, you've got to push more to play that theme to have the density in your deck.

So anyway, Impulsing does a lot of good. This is early us playing in this space, but it has been very valuable. Okay. Fate Unraveller. Three in a black, it's a enchantment creature. It's a hag. It's a three, four. Whenever opponent draws a card, it deals one damage to them.

So one of the things that's funny is, one of the things we like to do is we like to slice up the color pie, meaning there are effects that are very similar that we make a little. little bit different just so they play differently, right? We want different colors to feel differently. So one of the differences we do is that red tends to do direct damage to the opponent and black tends

to make them lose life. Now black can do damage because sometimes it drains them and drain requires us to do damage. But as a general rule of thumb, if black is going to just harm the opponent, not drain, but not gain life also, just harm the opponent. We normally have it lose

life. And then if red does it, red feels damage. And then we knew that is it's a little bit different. It feels a little bit different. Neither is particularly wordy to say. But one of the challenges, well sort of during this period, for a while we're like, well, do we really need to do that in black

and black just do damage. And we tried for a little a little while to have black do damage. And the sort of takeaway we had from it is it makes it feel a little less different. It's not that many words. People understood it. It wasn't a complication issue. So we ended up going back to lose life. So I think if we made this

card today, it would be lose life, not do damage. But anyway, at the time we made it. Okay, next, archetype of imagination. So this is four blue-blue-blue. It's an enchantment creature, human wizard. It's a three-two creature. Three-two? Yeah, I think it's three-two. So anyway, it has flying, or sorry, it has an ability that says creatures you control, which include it, have flying, and creatures controlled by other players lose flying and. cannot gain flying. So this is a cycle. The archetypes basically granted all your creatures some ability and removed that ability from your opponent. There was a cycle of them, each color, we'll talk a few coming up. But the blue one was flying. Blue was the strongest one, the one most

people played. And it's particularly powerful because if all my creatures fly and all your creatures don't fly, it's very hard, it very much makes my creatures on black. That's why this is probably the strongest one. Okay, next, whelming wave. Two blue-blue sorcery, return all creatures to their owner's hands, except crackens, Leviathens, octopuses, and serpents. So we've made a few of these cards, what the players have sort of dubbed the sea monster cards, that they, it's kind of a collection.

I think we first did it with Kiora. Kiora is one of our plainswalkers that really likes giant creatures of the ocean. And I think we did it with her. And it's just become, this is before we ever had official batching of any kind. It just was a group of things that we had done together a couple times, not tons of them, but there's a handful. And it definitely is, it's kind of the precursor to batching. I mean, batching would happen in Dominaria is where we sort of name the batch and then refer to the collective name of the batch. But this is us listing it out, and one of the early examples of us doing that.

And this card is pretty popular because if you're playing a deck in which you have some of those, it returns everything but your creature, so it's pretty powerful. Okay, now that's Mogus, God of Slaughter. Two black red. He's a legendary and shaming creature, 7-5. He does all, the same thing is he's indestructible. He's not a creature unless you have seven or more power of devotion to black and red for him. He's black-red.

And then beginning of your upkeep, beginning of each opponent's upkeep, that player has a choice. They can sack a creature or Mogis deals two damage to them. Mogus, I forget his name, he's part of a twin. He and the red-white god, who I'm blanking on the name of. They're twins, and they're both about conflict in different ways. The red-white is more of an orderly conflict. But anyway, so one of the challenges, by the way, is we decided to make one of the qualities we made of gods was that they were hard to get rid of, so we made them indestructible.

Now, if you remove other things around them, you can make them not be creatures. You do the ability to, sometimes the answer to them is I remove enough things that they stop being creatures. Now, they still have their enchantment effect, so it's not removing that. But anyway, we made this option in Theros to do this, and then all 15 gods were out under the structure. Turns out having 15 indestructible creatures was a bit much to the system. So when we revisit gods in future sets, we look for other ways to make them hard to get rid of without actually being indestructible. It's just hard to make a lot, especially creatures. you want to make really good because we wanted to gods be something you aspire to want it to play.

So that ended up proving to be a challenge. I'll call it that. Next, Heroes Podium. So it's a legendary artifact to cost five. All your legendary creatures get plus one, plus one for each other legendary creature you control. So this is, I made a card many years ago called, what was it, Crown of the Ages, where I was trying to make a card that helped you no matter what you were playing. And I wanted to make a typo card that was good, but could help anybody not necessarily a specific creature type. And so it did this thing where you got plus X plus X for every other creature of the same type, meaning as you had more of the creatures, they got bigger and bigger. So this is just us doing that for legendary creatures.

It does have a second ability, which is X and tap, look at the top cards of your library, to find the legendary creature. If you find one, you can reveal it, put in your hand, the rest of it on the bottom in random order. So it lets you, once again, we're trying to do less shuffling. So this, again, you have to pay into it. In order to find it, you want to have a density of legendary creatures. But one of the themes in the set was there's a little bit of legendary matters going on. And obviously, the hero's podium is part of that.

Next, archetype of endurance and archetype of aggression. So these are two more archetypes. Archetype of endurance is six green green for a six five boar, the enchantment creature. archetype of aggression is 1RR for a 3-3 enchantment creature human warrior and each of them does the same thing. They grant an ability to all your creatures and take it away from all your opponent's creatures. So endurance grants hex-proof to your creatures and removes hex-proof from your opponent's creatures. Architaph of aggression grants trample to all your creatures and moves tramples from opponent's creatures.

And you can tell, like, granting trample is not quite as, or removing trample. It's not, so it tends to be a little more, the body's a little better and smaller. Endurance is just a bigger creature. It's not six, five, is a bad creature, but for six green green, that's a lot of mana. But the idea of making all your creatures hexproof, we had to be careful with that. That's a dangerous thing. We do a lot less of hexproof nowadays than we used to. Hexproof is proven to be not so interactive.

We do it a little bit, but we're more careful. Okay. Karametra, God of Harvest. So she is three green-white, she's the green-white god, obviously a legendary enchantment creature of god, six, seven. Indestructible, you need devotion to green and white, a devotion of seven to green and white in order for her to become a creature. And whenever you cast a creature, you may search your library for forest or plains and put it on the battlefield tapped. So the idea is, the other thing to be aware of is each of the gods is a play pattern for the archetype. each, I mean, the monocolor ones were a little more general because they went in a bunch of different decks,

although even then, they tended to go in monocolor decks. So they were really playing into what the monocolor strength one be. If I'm playing a mono-white deck for Heliod, what does mono-white want to do? So these decks, the gods, and Born of the Gods, they're ally. Okay, what are the ally gods? Okay, green-white, well, green-white wants to sort of, you know, go wide and or make something big. And so it's helping you get mana. So the idea is, I want to play a lot of creatures.

and the more creatures I play, the more mana I get so I can cast more creatures and or bigger creatures. And so it's just playing into that. Black-red is more about aggression, so obviously it's making your opponent either give up blockers or take damage. So yeah, so that is... The key to the gods was

we knew that you were locked into playing a two... The thing about the god is, we know you're playing those two colors and only those two colors because of the nature how devotion works. And so we can make something that's really very much that sort of thing. Okay, next, Brahmaus, king of Orescos. One white, white, he's a three-four, a legendary creature, cat soldier.

He's got vigilance. And whenever he attacks, you create a one-one white cat creature token with vigilance that's also attacking with him. And whenever he blocks, you make a one-white-weller. cat with vigilance that's also blocking with him. So one of the things that we did in Theros is, not that cats are unique to Theros. Cats existed before Theros,

but we really started, well, sorry, we, well, one of the things we realized over a year, maybe I'm picking the wrong time here, but we realized that cats are pretty popular. Why? Because a lot of people own cats, and cats are cool. So cats and dogs have definitely become something we've paid a little bit more attention to,

And so here's us making a cat typal creature to help you sort of encourage you to play a cat deck. And a lot of people did. This is a popular creature. And cats have become quite popular. Okay. I'm almost to work. So this is my final card here.

Idleon of countless battles. So it's one white-white. It's an enchantment creature spirit, 06, but it's also as bestow. So for one-white, white is the creature. So I guess the bestow is higher. And bestow is two white-white. So what it says is either I or enchanted creature have plus one plus one for each creature,

each other creature you control, or no, each creature you control and each aura you control. So it does count itself. So the idea is that I just, I count all my creatures and all my oras, and either it's a creature that's that big, or it's an aura that adds plus X plus X, where X is that. and we had done a lot of idolines are created by the gods

and still creatures are of the gods by their enchantment creatures but also their aura so they need to be enchantments so anyway I'm almost to work here

so just a final wrap up I would say that Born of the Gods did not do well Theros actually did decently and then Born was one of the biggest drop-offs

we've had between first set and second set and then And like I said, the third said might have even done better the second set, which is, might be one of the few. I mean, I don't know whether it did better or not at the top of my head. I do know that the Journey Into Nix was better received than Born of the Gods. But also, we had perfectly saved something.

We knew people were really like for it. So I don't think I've done a Journey to the Nix. Probably the next one I'll get to. Not necessarily the very next one, but not the next. I do these every once in a while. So probably the next one where I do one of these is I'll do Journey Into Nix. Anyway, so my final thoughts of Born of the Gods is I generally like what Theros was doing.

I think Theros has a lot of fun mechanics. I think the two new mechanics in the set, tribute was kind of a dud. Inspired, I think, in the right environment. There's something interesting there. I think you want something native to the set that has a secondary way of tapping your creatures. I mean, Born of the Gods did it by making cards,

individually did it, but maybe having a mechanic or something, something that sort of cares. I can imagine, inspired coming back with the right setting, but it really needs, it needs a secondary reason why your creatures get tapped

rather than only being tapped by attacking, is my gun. But anyway, so it, it did okay, didn't do great. It is probably the second set that had the least, I don't know,

and once again, we took out monstrosity from it, we pushed back constellation. Like, There's a lot of things we did to try, I mean, by we, I did as the head designer, to try to sort of buff up the third set, to try to help the third set that in the end ended up hurting the second set. So some of Born of the Gods issues are a lot to do with things I chose when building out the block. But anyway, if you've never played Theros block, is actually a pretty fun block. I'm very proud. The core elements of Theros, I think, are pretty cool.

I do like the gods Maybe Indestructible wasn't the right call But the you know Bringing back devotion Redoing devotion You know there are a lot of small things Like we later redid heroic And anyway

There's a lot of things we did in the books That I'm proud of that were precursors of things But there were also a lot of things That had room for improvement And Born of the Gods was definitely bad So anyway That is all I have to say about Born of the Gods as I'm driving up to work right now.

I hope you guys enjoyed today's podcast, and I like doing, not just look back to sets, but a little more contextual look back to sets. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it. But as I'm now driving up to work, we all know what that means. It means instead of,

what does it mean? It means it's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.