Animate Artifact

In 1993, the artifacts that filled a blue deck were overwhelmingly noncreature utility pieces (mana rocks, damage-dealers, card-draw engines), and the color had no clean way to turn that material into a clock. This Aura was the answer, and the math was deliberately loose: the body scales with mana value, so a Mox becomes nothing while a Jayemdae Tome suddenly attacks as a 4/4. The card is a wager that you have already paid for a high-cost artifact and want to make it threaten lethal damage without recommitting mana to a separate threat. The fragility is the catch, not the rate (four mana for a variable creature was reasonable then): it is an Aura on a permanent the opponent already wants to destroy, doubling their reward for doing so, plus the guarding clause that quietly steps aside when the target is already a creature (Alpha shipped with Juggernaut, Obsianus Golem, and Clockwork Beast, so the rules team needed to handle that overlap from the start). Later blue would reach the same idea by cleaner routes (March of the Machines as a sweeping board state, the various Tezzeret animation modes), each one trimming the Aura's vulnerability or widening the target. This is the first attempt, preserved in amber: the design idea before the design language existed to express it efficiently.