Glacial Ray

Two damage at instant speed is a rate that was thin even in its own era, but the number printed on the front of the card is never the point. Splice lets the physical Ray stay in your hand all game, taxing each Arcane spell you cast for an extra two damage, because the spell it rides on is the one that goes to the graveyard. The convention that one card resolves once and leaves play stays intact; what splice quietly bends is the assumption that one card produces one effect. The same copy fires again and again, and the threat is the cumulative arithmetic across a game, not any single hit. That recurrence is bought with a hard dependency: with no Arcane spells to attach to, you are holding a clumsy two-damage instant for two mana and nothing else. The reward arrives only when the deck is dense enough with Arcane spells that the same Ray bolts onto a flurry of spells three or four times before the game ends. It is the cycle's workhorse precisely because two damage is the cheapest splice cost worth attaching to almost anything: a rider modest enough that you rarely regret paying it, repeatable enough that you eventually win on the accumulation.