About

Oko, Thief of Crowns is a planeswalker card in the customizable card game Magic: The Gathering printed in the expansion set Throne of Eldraine in 2019. Oko's primary ability is turning creatures and artifacts into Elk, and many of the memes refer to the preponderance of Elk that followed his introduction to the meta-game.

Origin

On August 28th, 2019, the character Ono was announced as part of the Throne of Eldraine expansion set.^[1] The character is considered one of the most dominant cards in Magic history (character shown below).

Spread

Following the announcement, fans of the card game began making jokes about the character. On September 7th 2019, Redditor ^[4] ReneDescartes314 captioned a Frank Reynolds meme with "Oko Time" (shown below).

Since Oko's role in the game is turning many other things into Elk, many of the memes created to describe or decry his overwhelming presence refer to the fact that everything has been turned into an Elk, or more specifically a 3/3 Elk.

Over the next few months, fans of the character made memes about Oko and turning things into Elk. For example, on October 25th, Twitter ^[2] user @jeremynoell captioned a news story about elk, "These Oko memes are getting out of hand" (shown below, left).

On October 26th, Redditor^[3] yeti1333 posted a They're The Same Picture meme. The post received more than 750 points (99% upvoted) in less than three weeks (shown below, center).

In the following weeks, others made jokes about elks in relation to the character (example below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References