God-Favored General

Inspired ties its reward to the untap step, which makes the whole mechanic a puzzle about getting a creature tapped and then back up again on your own terms rather than the opponent's. That demand sits awkwardly on a 1/1: this body attacks once, and the payoff only fires after it has tapped, survived, and reached your next untap, or been forcibly untapped mid-turn by some outside effect. Pay the on the way back and you bank two more 1/1 Soldiers, which is to say the card wants a one-power creature to swing into a board that would rather kill it. That friction is the heart of the design space, and it is also why Inspired never quite cohered: the cards that fed it best were the ones that untapped your team for free, and those were scarce. What the General does have, quietly, is a token engine that compounds across multiple untaps. Each trigger adds bodies, and the Soldiers it makes are themselves enchantment creatures, a small nod toward the enchantment-matters strata of its era. Left undisturbed, it grows a board out of nothing for three mana a turn; the trouble is that "left undisturbed" is doing enormous work for a creature that has to attack as a 1/1 to earn its first untap in the first place.