Part one is located here. And awaaaaaaaaaaay we go:

69. Howling Mine

As awful as it was that the frequent re-templating to this card, not to mention its actual functionality was of-ten wishy washy, the "real" Howling Mine, the one that can be "turned off and on" when you want it to be - often giving yourself a cheap, "free" Phyrexian Arena! - is a design marvel. It is simple, it is fun, it is conceptually obvious, and it still belongs in Magic all these years later. Win or lose, Howling Mine usually means fun for all. So few designs from Alpha are this enduring, but the ones that are? What an achievement for Richie G!

The first Magic set ever will have other entries. Stand by.

68. Phyrexian Negator

Black's clever insistence you put up sacrificial resources in very dirty ways has been there from the get go, but it wasn't until this that the concept got a brand new, interesting dimension. The risk was higher, but so too was the reward, and a card that many immediately downplayed as insanely useless became relevant in sev-eral formats, including as a clever Necropotence out.

Phyrexian Negator is a great reminder of the contextual importance of a card's function: The most intuitively useless ability may in actuality be among the most powerful available if it can be framed op-timally. Sleep on nothing unless you're positively sure, and even then, it's not recommended.

67. Mantis Rider

Mantis Rider is one of the best examples of how a card, when executed at the right time, is more than the sum of its parts.

Though it could be argued it landed in circumstantial Standard play patterns that were less than desirable, that was obviously less a function of this card's design and more the reality of living with Jace, Vryn's Prodigy in a slow format. Either way, the truth about Mantis Rider is that it's a cleaner de-sign than its closest intuitive predecessor, Lightning Angel. It's got a triple tri-color mana cost in a set that wanted to emphasize exactly that: specific three-color trios. The power and toughness matching with three (of course) relevant abilities made it a tough but fair card. Its efficient import later into the strong Hu-mans archetype only further emphasizes how uniquely clever this card's design is: You never think about it much because it seems simple, but the brilliance is in the details and the restraint.

66. Steamflogger Boss

Honestly, if it weren't for the added Contraption niche in one of the recent parody sets, this card might be even higher. And no, I'm not kidding.

The truth is, Magic needs cards like this. In an era where anyone can look up anything to learn about it, it's pretty amazing that there's a card that's so much an in-joke and so on-theme for its set that the implications don't become clear until you've taken a step toward the "bigger than the box" understanding of Magic. And with the abundant populous of Magic players, myself included, being proud members of the world's smartass demographic, cards like this once in a while - done tastefully and sparingly - can act as much like a recruiter for the game as anything that wins tournaments all the time.

Just as Magic is a bigger game than its box, so too is a card's design occasionally bigger than Magic design itself. It makes no sense, but it's still cohesive. That's a sign of something bril-liant.

Magic is life; and there are no absolutes.

65. Force of Savagery

Another Future Sight entry - a set where the primary theme is design creativity, did well in terms of design creativity, more news at eleven - Force of Savagery has many of the same design evo-cations to me as Phyrexian Dreadnought, which I described in part one.

The difference is that this card is cleaner and belongs to a set in which this sort of thing was actively encour-aged, as well as being a lot closer to Green's most ideal version of clever color pie work. It's a more contem-porary version of the same ideas, however, so if you want to re-read the Dreadnought entry from last week to get a better understanding of what the hell I'm on about, again, get in there.

64. Homeward Path

This card is among the first and best moves by formal design institutions at Wizards of the Coast to design cards specifically for Commander. Appearing in the first special product for Commander, Homeward Path was a Wizard of Oz nod with a particularly evocative blank slate: The card's idea was obvious and perfect for multiplayer, as well as complex gameplay states.

But its execution was such that any player could paint their own idealistic portrait of home onto it. As is the case with so many great Magic designs, the difference between good and great lies in on-ly doing as much design work as you need to so that the player gets to enjoy doing all the rest.

63. Progenitus

Conflux seemed like a fairly innocuous set during its anticipation period. The strange thing was, even though there was an all-gold set lying in wait at the end of its block, a few major haymaker gold designs were put in the middle set: Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker and Progenitus.

The more interesting design between the two is far and away the latter. Text like "Protection from everything" is some of the most awesome, it-can't-mean-what-I-think-it-means text in Magic history, but because of its excellent failsafe text afterward, it has never been particularly bothersome in the way something like Emrakul - in any iteration - can be sometimes.

It should have been a total jump the shark moment, but it never has been. The design is the sole reason, though as a sidenote, I still feel we're in pretty desperate need of a keywordification of the "can't be in the graveyard, please shuffle" text. Obviously, the original Eldrazi would be the version of the effect you'd want to keyword, as it's the most common, but I digress.

62. Thraben Inspector

As Magic has evolved through the years, one of the more interesting adjustments has been how each color mitigates its draw deficiency with Blue (historically, of course; now Green is arguably better by a lot of practical metrics, and the other colors are closer than they've ever been to finally being caught up in their own ways).

One of the best examples of how simply you can make a great, tournament Magic card is Thraben Inspector. Its ability makes sense, it's relevant at every turn of the game, and it even has the trademark "+1 toughness" to keep it from being Elvish Visionary with a bag on its head. It's a great step in the right direction.

61. Endless One

The uses for this card are technically finite, I think, but someone should just ask Frank Karsten, to be sure. The fact it's conceptually on the money, all while taking place on a Magic card that has scalable utility throughout a game but that can remain (generally) fair while still encompassing the mind-blowing space alien stuff that was mostly just more numbers and more added rules text elsewhere in the cosmic family. It also has interesting interactions because of how often X is "zero" - think Ranger of Eos and such - to the point where it's undeniable this is a very brilliant fellow indeed.

The cool things you can say about this card are basically...

snort

...large in number.

distant cough

60. Search for Azcanta//Azcanta, the Sunken Ruin

Search for Azcanta, besides maybe the flip stuff that a small pocket of contrarian awfuls out there somewhere may still incorrectly thinks sucks, is everything anyone could ever want in a tournament-reasonable Magic: the Gathering card.

It has the control dream of being an early and relevant Blue card while both not feeling intuitively like an im-mediate beating to an opponent; it's a card that has interesting functions in a variety of game states and for-mats; and it's a marquee example of the infinite design space of Magic. It also tells an at-mospheric story that sells the set it belongs to, so let's not forget that!

Greatness...At A Variety of Costs

Despite the times in which we find ourselves, I will diligently go down the rabbit hole of Magic history to bring you the very best of the game evermore, so that we may inform and shape the game's best qualities for years to come.

A few great designs to look forward to:

(~_^)

The Rascal

The Indestructible Danny West