Cyclopean Tomb

The front half is a slow land-conversion engine: four to cast, then two and a tap each upkeep to put a single mire counter on a non-Swamp land, with the type change resolving the moment the ability does. That is the immediate payoff, whether you are fixing your own mana or stripping an opponent's utility land of its special abilities. The back half is the price tag, and it is unusually severe. Sacrificing or losing the artifact does not end the conversion; it starts a second, permanent upkeep trigger that ticks counters off the lands you converted, one per turn, for as long as the game runs, on a clock you cannot interact with through normal means. The card is structurally a Faustian bargain: the conversion is durable while the Tomb lives, but its death writes a clause into every future upkeep of the match. This reads like a designer working out, in public, what a permanent state-changing effect should cost in drawbacks. Modern design has almost entirely abandoned the shape; lasting triggers that persist after the permanent that created them is gone are exactly the bookkeeping the rules team has steadily engineered away from. Read today, it is a window into a moment when the game was willing to let an artifact's death haunt a match indefinitely, and willing to charge the player who broke it with remembering for as long as anyone kept playing.