Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1380: Atogs

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

This podcast is the history of one of Magic's hungriest creature types, one I had a huge hand in designing.

I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time another drive to work. Okay, so today is all about A-Tog. So for those that don't know, before I came to Wizards, my favorite set was Antiquities, and my favorite card in the set was A-Tog. Everybody has this little personal card

that they attached to. Mine was A-Tog. So let me talk. I want to talk all about A-Tog today. and all the A-Tog-inspired cards, all of which I had a hand in, because I like A-Tog a lot. So, okay, so let's talk about where A-Tog came from. So A-Tog, by the way, for those who don't know, was in Arabian Nights. It costs one in a red mana, so two mana, one of which is red.

It's a 1-2 creature. And then it had an activated ability, sack an artifact. And then A-Tog gets plus-2-2, and it'll end up. turn. So let's talk about what... So antiquities was designed by the East Coast play thefters, Scafellius, Jim Lynn, Dave Petty, and Chris Page.

And I think Joel Mick might have had a little bit to involvement in that set as well. So I'm not sure which of them actually designed Atog. So Atog is an anagram of goat because he likes to eat things. You know, artifact thing. So

Antiquities, for those that don't know, was the second ever magic expansion. And it was the first magic expansion to have a mechanical theme. So Alpha came out and then Alpha, Beta, you know, limited and unlimited. Arabian Nights was the first set that had sort of a theme to it, first expansion, but it had a flavor theme. It took place in a thousand one Arabianites. So Antiquities was the first set that had a mechanical theme. And that mechanical theme was artifacts, and it hit it very hard.

With the exception of a handful of lands in the set, every single card has either is an artifact or references artifacts in its rules text. Meaning the word artifact is on almost every single card in the set minus, like I said, a couple lands. And even the lands, Tephyrcalus, and were meant for you to play, you know, artifacts and such. So one of the little guys they made This was a comment they made in the set was Atog I think they just liked the idea of something that you could sacrifice artifacts to to give them a temporary boost

So It came out And the audience's first initial reaction to Atag was not very positive It seemed like a bad card It's like I have to get rid of a whole artifact And what do I get? A temporary boost to my creature? That doesn't say.

seemed good. And it was a common, and then what happened was, it got printed antiquities, and then Revised came out. So Revised was kind of like third edition, because Alpha and Beta and Slash Limited, or Limited Edition, and then there was Unlimited Edition, and then there was revised, so Revised was kind of like third edition. And Atog was a common in third edition. There were cards from Rabianites and Antiquities that were put into the Corset. And so, I think there was a point in time because there was more, I believe there was more antiquities printed than there was

Alpha and Beta, I believe. So I think there was a point in time, because A-Tog was a common in Revised, where there were more A-Togs in print than any non-Bit, you know, other than basic land, than any other card. And I remember stories, I don't know, I mean, I don't know

these are urban legends are actually true, but I know stories of people ripping up A-Togs when they opened them. Like, there was a lot of hate for Atog, which I personally did not understand. Because here's a little secret about A-Tog. It's a very good card. It is still, to this day, played in formats. It is a very good card.

In fact, I wrote an article for the duelists called the top 10 most underrated cards in magic, where I was trying to take cards that I thought were much, much better than the average thought of the audience. And my pick for, number one, was A-Tog. Because he was, for some reason, a lot of people didn't like him. And I'm like, and he's good. He's like, very good. So I made a lot of decks.

I had a lot of A-Togs in my decks. I liked artifacts specifically as a theme. So I played with a lot of A-Tog. I really liked A-Tog. So A-Tog was illustrated by Yesper Mierforce, a Magic's first art director. And he was cute. And I, I don't know.

know, I fell in love. I really really liked A-Tog. I thought he was a lot of fun. So, let's talk a little bit about how more A-Togs came to be because I was involved. So like I said, I had nothing to do

with the design of A-Tog. I just was a fan of A-Tog. I did not anything to do with Antiquities. I was not at Wizards yet. So I had zero-do with A-Tog. But every other card we're talking about today, I did have a hand-in as, I think, the biggest A-Tog fan

in the building. Okay, so next we got So we get to Mirage. So I start working at Wizards in the fall of 95. And the very first set that I'm assigned to work on is Antiquity, not antiquities, is alliances. And so alliances was kind of the, basically what happened was there were a bunch of people working at Magic R&D. A few of them left Wizards, and most of them were moving to work on other games. and they hired four people to sort of be the new magic R&D.

The four people were myself, Bill Rose, William Jockish, and Mike Elliott. So there was a period in time where the four of us were Magic R&D. Not that the other people never worked on Magic. They did. Magic was a big part of the company. But we were the only four people sort of full time on Magic at that time. So Mirage was...

So Antiquities... not Equities. All of Arndie. was kind of everybody in the building. All of R&D worked on it. And if you've never heard me talk about alliances, there was a lot on stake at the time. It's the longest gap between printing of magic sets. The last magic set had a lot of issues with it,

which was Homeland. So there's a lot of pressure on alliances to be great. So the development team for that set with literally like 13 people, like everybody in R&D, I believe, at the time. But when we got to Mirage, we sort of settled in, and Mirage was kind of back to the norm, which was the four, you know, new R&D folk,

we were the development team. Now, interestingly, Bill Rose had led, what now we know is Mirage was called Menagerie during design, and he also led the development. Anyway, the important story here is, we are in a development meeting, we're looking through the file, and there's a card, I don't remember the original name of the card,

but it had an activated ability and the activated ability was spend a green mana sacrifice to forest and then the creature got plus two plus two to end of turn and I think it was even I don't remember the stats exactly

it might have been two manna 1-2 I'm not all I know is I remember looking at this and just saying okay before talk so anyway I said to them when we were looking at it I go this

this is an agent I go, if, you know, if you sacked an untapped forest, um, I think we, well, I think the final, the, the current version of Oracle is green sack of forest. But

essentially it's like sack an untapped forest, get plus two plus two. I think, look, that's an, that's an, that's an talk. Um, you know, why don't we just call it an A-tog? So we changed the name from whatever it was to Foratog and we made it an A-tog. I might

have tweaked its numbers a little bit. But in the end, so for a tog, two and a green, one, two, green, sack of forest, this creature gets plus two plus two until end of turn. So we made that. I was very excited. I'm like, oh, okay, now we have a green A-Tog. So I'm like,

well, there's a red A-Tog, there's a green A-Tog, and I was now a man on a mission. So this is what we call a megacycle. In fact, I think the A-Tog cycle might be the first megacycle. Meaning, it was something where

we decided to do something in consecutive sets, like a cycle not all in one set. Normally, cycles were all in one set. And what we said is, we're going to do something where every set's going to have one of these until we finish it off. And I mean, there are a bunch of other

megacycles, but I think Atog's the first, kind of the first planned megacycle. Mirage would also have, a card called the Ferry's Isle that I would spearhead a mega-mecicle where there's a card added every block to it, took five blocks. But anyway, for a toad, I'm pretty sure it came first. So I'm like, okay, we have a red-a-tog, we have a green-a-tog. And so we were working on visions. And so I'm like, oh, we have to have, we have, so we needed a blue, black, or white

a toad. So I came up with a cool idea. A togs eat things, right? So the original red one eight artifacts, the green one ate forests. So what would Blue eat? You know, Blue's not big on sacrificing, so it was a little trickier. And so then we came up with the idea of what if Blue ate time? And so we called him Kronatog, because Krohn means time is like the land root for time. So, so Chrono Tog is one in the blue for a one-two creature, of course, a-tog.

For zero colon, we don't do a lot of zero-colons, this creature gets plus three plus three until end of turn. You skip your next turn, activate only ones per turn. So the idea is you can make him bigger, but in order to do that, you had to skip your next turn. You're eating a turn. So, Coronatog, we ended up making a plus three plus three for balance. I think he's the only A tog, the original five A togs that are, all of them, I think, are one, two. They cost different amounts. They cost two or three mana mostly.

The amount of values are two or three. And all of them get plus two, plus two, I think, except for a Corona Tag because eating a turn is a little more bigger of a cost. So we gave them plus three, plus three. And that was InVisions. Okay, the next set we were working on was Weatherlight. And so we decided, oh, weatherlight had a graveyard theme. So I'm like, oh, well, we could tie into the graveyard theme. What if we made an A-Tog, then it's the graveyard.

So we made Necratog, a necrataug being the Latin root, I think, for death. So Necratog is one black-black, again, a one-two-a-to-a-to-a-tog. Exile the top creature card of your graveyard. So this does something we don't do much anymore. It cares about graveyard order. We stopped doing that right around this time. This is probably one of, I mean, there might have been, I think Tempest Block might have had a couple.

But we pretty much, Tempest Block is the last time we did Graveyard Order matters. Like this could have just been exile a creature card to graveyard, but it's not. It's exiled the top creature card. I think we do that so you didn't quite control. You had a little less control, I guess. This creature gets plus two plus two to end of turn.

So the idea is this thing. eats dead creatures. That's with a nekhartog. Yum yum, yum, dead creature at least yum, yum to necrotog. Okay, well, my next set was Tempest. And that meant Tempest had to have the white atog. Okay, what does the white atog? White's not really about sacrificing creatures or artifacts.

I mean, it occasionally does. But we decided that what white's really interesting in is enchantments. So Oratog was one in a white for a one-two. sacrifice and enchantment because plus two. I like that it was the direct parallel to original A-Tog, which ate artifacts.

This ate enchantments. And so, I will say that A-Tog is stronger than is stronger than Oratog because it's just a lot easier to get cheap. Yeah. Oh, one of the reasons, by the way, that I think A-Tog is still competitive

is it became a lot, lot easier to get artifacts. We started out of proliferation of artifact tokens, which A-Tog's happy to eat. And that I think is why A-Tog still stays strong is, while in general, cars have gotten, you know, creatures have gotten better over time, the ability to make cheap artifacts,

because now it's not tied to a card. You can make cards that generally make multiple token artifacts, and so one card can generate more than one artifact. Okay, so we had a cycle of A-Togs. I was happy. We had our first megacycle. So the next part of the story happens in unglued two. What is unglued two?

So unglued one was the set I made that hopefully you know of. That was a sort of a parody set. I was given the assignment of this set is not tournament legal. We end up putting silver borders on it. And the idea you can do whatever you want, it's not tournament legal. This is for casual play. It's not for tournament play. It's for casual play.

So in the future, all casual play can play with these cards. Okay, that didn't happen. But anyway, I had a lot of fun. And so one of the things... Oh, sorry. So I made unglued. It did very well out of the gate. We green-lit un-glued two.

So in un-glued-2, I ended up making a card called a-tog-a-tog. In fact, I had someone... The art for Otag-a-Tog showed the King of the A-Togs surrounded by the five A-Togs, the At-Togs we'd made in the cycle. And the idea was the Atag-a-Tog-T-A-T-T-T-E. who themselves ate other things. And so Atagatog, his design, was white, blue, black, red, green,

5-5, legendary creature. So the first legendary, in fact, the only legendary A-Tog. Sacrifice an A-Tog creature. A-Tog is plus-X-X until end of turn, where X is a sacrificed creature's power. So the idea is that you could sacrifice things to your A-Togs and then sacrifice your A-Togs to the Atagat-a-Tog. Anyway,

unglued two went on to not be made. And so we had art for it because we had unglued too, got canceled really late in the process. We had art was in. That's normally when things get canceled before art is in. But art is in. But anyway, we put it on slush because we didn't make it. Okay, so that is a talk to-tog, but he didn't get printed.

So now we forward to Odyssey. So Odyssey was my fourth design. I designed Tempest I design unglued, I designed Urs's legacy and my fourth set was Odyssey Odyssey

was focused on the graveyard so the set before was Invasion that's beginning of what I call the third age of design we start having blocks with themes to them. Invasion had a multicolored theme. Odyssey had a graveyard

theme. So I'm the lead designer and I'm handing off to Randy Bueller who's the lead developer. And Randy, so we had this period in-between design development that we called divine, where we'd get notes on this, like the development lead would look at the set

and give us notes so that if there are things they were concerned about, we had time to fix them before design handed over to development. So this is back in the day that we had designed development. We hadn't got to vision design, set design, play design yet. So what happened is, Randy said to me could you make a cycle of multicolored atogs? And what he meant by that was ally.

So could I make a cycle of ally atods? And I said, yes, I could. So what I ended up doing, so let me read you the five and then I'll sort of talk through them. So these are just an alphabetical order. I'll do them in order. First is white blue, fantatog, one white blue, creature A tog. Sacrifice an enchantment, this creature gets plus one plus one until end of turn.

And then discard a card. This creature gets plus one plus one to end of turn. Then we have psychotog, this blue black. Psychotog is one blue black for a one, two. Discard a card, this creature gets plus one plus one end of turn. Exhale, two cards through your graveyard. This card gets plus one plus one until end of turns. Then we have in red green is lith.

black red is... Where's black red? Sorry, give me a second. Black red is Sarcatog. Sarcatog is one black red, one, two, exiled two cards in your graveyard, a creature gets plus one plus one to end of turn. Or sacrifice an artifact,

this creature gets plus one plus one to end of turn. And then there was the red green lithotog. One red green, one two. Sacrifice an artifact plus one, plus one, sacrifice the land, get plus one, plus one. And then Thalmatog was one green white. Creature A tog one-two, one-two, one-green-white. Sacrifice a land plus-1-plus-one.

Sacrifice an enchantment plus-1-plus-one. Okay, so hopefully you can see the structure. They all cost one, what we call M-N. So one, a color, another color, always allied. Always a one-two creature. And then each color has a special thing you can sacrifice to get plus-1-plus-one. But because there's two colors, each color gets to a bill.

And instead of sacrificing one thing to get plus two plus two, you've optioned to sacrifice two different things to get plus one plus one. And what we did is where we could, white was second enchantment, red was second artifact, that is or a tog and normal a tog. Black was eat not a creature card, but two cards out of your graveyard. We felt that was just a little, like, he's still eating things on the graveyard, but it was a little more utility to it. green we expanded instead of sacrificing a force in particular it sacrificed a land but reminiscent of fortog and then blue um the challenge with blue was time is just not easy to do so instead of doing that we had you sack a card from your hand that felt really cool and there was a lot of good synergies especially the blue black card psychotog ended up being the powerhouse of this interestingly by the

way, Psychotog, the white blue creature, and Fantatog, the white blue creature, and Psychotog, the blue-black creature, originally had swapped names. Odyssey, for those that ever heard the story, for reasons I won't get into, I was in charge of names and flavor text for Odyssey. So I actually named these Atogs. And all of them did a similar thing where we took sort of roots. I don't know if they're all necessarily Latin roots, but there are different roots.

and I attached them. So originally the white-blue one was Psychotog, and the blue-black one was Fantatog. I just thought Psychotog was the better name, and I knew that the blue-black was the better card. So right before we went out, I swapped them. And I'm very, very glad we did, because Psychotog, once again, of all the Atogs,

other than Atag himself, has probably been the biggest player, maybe bigger than At-Tog, been the biggest player. Psychotog is a very strong card. And then mostly the synergy there is you can discard cards from your hand and then you can eat the cards. And so, for example, I can give it plus three. If I'm willing to discard two cards, that's plus three plus three.

Because I get one for each card I discard and then one more for the two cards from the graveyard. So anyway, that would be really good. So I made those cards for Randy. He really liked them. And then I said to Randy, Randy, Randy, I got a bargain for you. I made you a six card to go along with this. and it doesn't even need art, I already got art. And so I put a togg-to-to-it-to-s.

And Randy likes a to-to-to-tog. And so we had the five-a-togs and a tog-a-tog. So our little band of five-a-togs goes up to 11-a-togs. And so the thing that was super fun was I really did enjoy the challenge of saying, how do I make these reminiscite of A-Tog, of the A-Togs, but in a way that truly leaned into the multicol. So I really, really did like their design. I was happy to get A-Tog-A-Tog on a card,

which I guess is the... If you want to make an A-Tog... I guess the biggest problem is there's not infinite A-Togs. I guess you need a lot of changelings to make it work. But there is at least now a legendary... There's a legendary A-Tog. Okay, so now let's move on. So the next A-Tog, so that's Odyssey.

The next A-Tog does not show up until Mirrodin. So for those that don't know, so it's Odyssey, then Onslaught, and then after On-Slot is Mirrodite. So two blocks later. So let me talk a little bit about original A-Tog, by the way. So original A-Tog, like I said, was in antiquities. And then he shows up in revised. He shows up for the next time in fifth edition.

And then we are making Miriden. Miriden is an artifact world, right? It was so much like invasion was multicol, Odyssey was the graveyard, Onslaught was typo. I really wanted to make an artifact block. I got sign off from Bill. Bill was a head design at the time. And he said, I could do it, so I led Miridon.

And I was making Mirridan. And it's a world, I worked with a creative team, and we made a world, an artificial world, made by Karn, where just living in the world, you slowly, like, got metastatized with metal over time. Like, slowly metal would sort of become part of your biology. And I'm like, we have a world made of metal. We've got to have A-Tog there. And so we put A-Tog in.

So A-Tog, that's the force that he gets in. He also was in Mafters Edition for Online. But Antiquities Revised, Fifth Edition, to Mirrodin are the four sort of printed sets that he showed up in. So anyway, I put A-Tog into Myridden. Very excited to do so. And then I realized that opportunity, since we had normal A-Tog, I decided to make Megatog. Which, by way, his design name was, in fact, Megatog.

And I always said, Megatog. That is how I said his name. Or as I continue again. So Megatog is four red-red. It's an A-Tog. So he's bigger than an A-Tog. So he's bigger than an A-Tog. So he made him 3-4.

So he's still, like, toughness plus-1 power to be remincent of the 1-2, but be a little bit bigger. And then for him, you sacrifice an artifact, and he gets plus 3, plus 3 to Land of Dern. He gets even bigger. Now, he's not quite as strong as A-Tog, ironically, because he's plus three, we made him bigger. And also, he's not nearly sure.

A-Tog, like I said, is still a pretty strong card. But anyway, we put Megatog. into Meriden. I was tickled. I just like the idea of a giant Atoe. The Atok was always been a little tiny guy, so I thought it was fun that, what if there was a little,

a big A-Tog? So, I did that. You'll notice a little pattern of, what if A-Tog was in different colors? What if A-Tog was legendary? What if A-Tog was bigger? So the final, A-Tog's final appearance

is in time spiral, which is a few blocks later. Actually, we now get to the point, where I am head designer. And so in Time Spiral, Time Spiral had a time theme. Time Spiral itself was about the past. Plata Chaos was about an alternate present, and FutureSight was about the future.

So in Time Spiral, we decided we wanted to make a series of sort of artifact mana. And so the idea that we came up with was, it was a cycle. The cards cost three. They tap for a particular color. There were five of them, one for each color.

And then if you spent a certain amount of mana, and that amount of mana was the cost of the creature we were referencing, the artifact turned into that creature. So, let's see. And we got corky with the creatures we turned into, because we decided we're trying to do throwbacks. So we didn't want to do boring things. We wanted to do...

You turned into, like, kind of weird, quirky cards from the past. So, let's see. Thunder TOTEM was the white one. That was referencing Thunder Spirit from... What's Thunder Spirit? From Legends, I think. The black one was... Phorexian...

What did it make? Made a phrexian. one of the five five phrexian what's the ferexian's name anyway it made him into a phrexian the red one was the vagina four eyes the he's a card in alpha that lets you block two creatures and then the green one was weatherlight tree folk which was probably the latest of the five but for the blue one what does it turn into?

Why, it turns into Chronatog. So this is the only, I will call artifact atog. I mean, it's not an artifact creature. But it's an art, well, I mean, it can turn into a creature. So it's an artifact that can turn into an atog.

And that is the, was the, let's see, there is 11, 12, 13. That's the 13th and final ATOG. So that is, and as I said, I did not do A-Tog, but the other 12 cards I had a direct hand in. So, very, very involved in the A-Togs. I'm at work now.

I'm at work now. I'm just trying to think of any final thoughts on A-Togs. The reason I wanted to do this podcast today is just, I like looking back at little small slivers of magic history. I have a fondness for an A-Tog, and so back in the day, I made Minnie an A-Tog. I still, I mean, like I said, A-Tog has a lot of history. It was the first megacycle. He's one of the early, I mean,

he was not the first five-collar card, but one of the earlier five-color cards, and especially one of the earlier five-color legends, although Sliber Queen beat him to that. But he's an early one. And so, anyway, it is, it is, I don't know, I still have warm thoughts on A-T, Oh, the final thing, I guess, it's keeping Atog alive, is when I first started my blog,

originally I thought I was just going to post comics. I had a little comic trip I was making back then called Tales for the Pit. And so when I first made it, I called it Tales from the Pit. Because I thought it just would be a place for me to put my comics. I didn't expect it. But when I set it up, it asked me, would I be willing to answer questions? And I said, yeah, sure, having a little idea of what I was signing up for. And for those who don't know, if you ever go to Tumblr, I have a blog.

So I renamed my blog, because I decided I needed to give it a blog name. And sort of dipping into my love of A-Togs, I named it Blog-a-Tog. So one could say maybe the honorary 14th A-Tog is my blog-a-tog. But anyway, people always ask what Blogget-Og eats, and the answer is other blogs. If you ever notice how people do blogs And then one day they just stop doing the blog The blogs should disappear Well, that is because Blogga Tog

Has eaten well that day But anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed This sort of jaunt through the history Of the A-Tog The little goat that can If you've never, by the way, played with the card The original card A-Tog And you would all like artifacts

It is still to this day a very good card for as much more lined as the card was back in 1994. There's not a lot of cards you can say that were good in 1994, that came out in 1994, that people still play today. There's some, obviously. But one of them is Atok. So anyway, guys, thank you for joining me on my little story today. But I'm at work.

And so I all know what that means today? Today. That means that's the end of my drive to work. So instead of talking magic, it's time to me to be making magic. See you. time, bye-bye.