Consuming Vortex

Strip a single creature back to its owner's hand for two mana, and you have an ordinary bounce spell, the kind blue has carried since the beginning. What changes the math is the option printed underneath: pay more while casting any Arcane spell, and the bounce rides along on top of whatever that spell already does. Splice rewards building a critical mass of Arcane cards, letting one card in hand contribute to spell after spell without ever being cast on its own. That is the tension. As a standalone instant, Consuming Vortex is replacement-level tempo, deliberately so; its value sits in reserve, redeemable only by a deck that traffics in Arcane spells and can afford the surtax. Because a spliced card never leaves your hand, the same copy bounces a blocker today and is still there to staple onto the next Arcane spell tomorrow: a recurring, tax-funded tempo lever rather than a one-shot. This is one piece of a small, self-contained design experiment in modularity, spells built to be attached to other spells, where the deckbuilding question is not "is this bounce good enough" but "do I have enough Arcane density to keep paying four mana a turn for the privilege." Outside that shell it is a plain card doing a plain job. Inside it, it is one tile in a stacking engine.