Hideous Laughter

Splice is the trick that lets this sweep live in your hand indefinitely instead of expending itself once. The base effect is honest enough: a -2/-2 wipe that black has always been allowed to price fairly, clearing the smallest creatures and leaving anything with three toughness standing. What the Arcane subtype changes is the casting math. By paying the splice fee as you cast another Arcane spell, you reveal this card from hand and fold the sweep onto whatever was already on the stack, then keep the physical card to do it again next time you have a carrier. A deck stuffed with cheap Arcane chatter can recur the same wipe over and over without ever committing it as a standalone play. That stapling also shifts the counterplay: the sweep rides on top of a spell already on the stack, so an opponent answering the carrier has to weigh whether their counter is worth spending on a spell that now does two things. The cost of all that recyclability is a low floor; -2/-2 punishes go-wide weenie boards and barely scratches fat midrange. As a demonstration of why splice was genuinely novel, it lands cleanly: a sweeper that waits in hand as a permanent recurring option, spent and recovered each time, contingent only on having Arcane spells to carry it.