Lots of decks pair the Mine with Relic Barrier or Icy Manipulator to make the card advantage one-sided, but then the low cmc of Howling Mine is wasted on controlling factors
Blink Riders looks to work a mana denial angle to go after the big mana decks with a vengeance
Those numbers are not meant to be a quantitative measure but merely to illustrate that the more obvious a deck is, the higher its staples go
Magic was the very first TCG ever created, and as you can probably expect, trying to put its foot out there was not without some design decisions that don't reflect what you find in more modern cards
It's also there for game one , so you have more chances to steal games by drawing your hate cards
Tough, offensive, and usually pretty straightforwardthough of course, there are plenty of wild exceptions