Ashnod's Transmogrant

An Antiquities-era oddity built around a single tap that does two unrelated jobs: it grows a creature with a +1/+1 counter, and it converts that creature's type to artifact. In 1994 the second clause mattered because artifact was a binary switch into and out of a whole suite of artifact-matters effects (Shatter, Energy Flux, Titania's Song, the Disenchant-shaped half of the color pie). The sacrifice cost is the design discipline: you spend the Transmogrant itself to convert one creature, so the card cannot chain or be reused, and the counter is the consolation prize that keeps the type-change from feeling like pure setup for someone else's removal. That second clause has aged into something stranger than its designers could have planned for. Decades of artifact-matters mechanics (affinity, metalcraft, improvise, the modern proliferate-on-artifacts shells) have given the type-change a long tail of incidental synergies the original card was never priced against. What looks like a clunky common is, structurally, one of the earliest printed examples of permanent type-changing as a deliberate effect rather than a byproduct, and the template the card established (sacrifice a small artifact, convert a creature's type, leave a counter behind) has been quietly revisited across artifact-themed sets since. It is an enabler, not a tutor: it fetches nothing, it reshapes what is already on the battlefield.