A Magic: The Gathering card.
Card Title: Atog
Card Type: Summon Atog
Colour: Red
Editions: Antiquities, Revised Edition, Fifth Edition
Artist: Jesper Myrfors
Casting Cost: 1R
Power/Toughness: 1/2
Rarity: Common (Antiquities/Revised), Uncommon (Fifth)
Card Text: 0: +2/+2 until end of turn. Each time you use this ability, you must choose one of your artifacts in play and place it in the graveyard. This artifact cannot be one that is already on its way to the graveyard, and artifact creatures killed this way may not be regenerated.
Rulings:
- Text(Oracle): Sacrifice an artifact: Atog gets +2/+2 until end of turn. 1/2
The Atog from Antiquities was the first of its kind and has been the focal point of both considerable derision and considerable fondness from Magic players. At its release in Revised Edition, it was one of the most common Magic cards available. Partly because it is relatively narrow for a common, and partly because players at the time saw no benefit in its special ability, it was widely ignored. Eventually, though, it was discovered that its ability, through the large numbers of cheap (0 or 1 casting cost) artifacts, could be a cost-effective way to get a big, fat creature. Suddenly, any artifact could be a slightly less effective Giant Growth, without even having to play with green. Another feature of the Atog which endeared it to players was its very appropriate card art, which makes it look like something which ate priceless artifacts and thought they were mighty tasty.
For Fifth Edition, Atog was moved to the Uncommon sheet because of its power and complexity. All other atogs have always been uncommon or rare.
Atog is also a creature type, all members of which have some sort of 'throw something away to power up' ability. There is currently one atog in each of the five colours, one atog for each adjacent pairing of colours, and one five-colour atog. The single-coloured atogs are:
For the Odyssey set, a cycle of dual-coloured atogs was created. Each colour was assigned a 'diet' and each atog was given the diets of the two colours it belongs to. Unlike the single-coloured atogs, which get +2/+2 for each sacrifice, the dual-coloured atogs only get +1/+1. The 'diets' for the five colours are:
- Red: artifacts
- Green: lands
- White: enchantments
- Blue: cards in hand
- Black: pairs of cards in graveyard
and the five dual-colour atogs are:
Finally, there's the five-coloured Atogatog, which eats other atogs. Yes, that's really as narrow as it sounds.
(CC)
This writeup is copyright 2003 D.G. Roberge and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial licence. Details can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/2.0/ .