Sideswipe

Redirection has always been a niche trick, but tying it to the Arcane subtype made it sharper than the generic article. The whole point is that the spell still resolves: you are not countering an opposing splice-laden burn spell or removal effect, you are rerouting where it lands. Every Arcane cast trigger, every spliced rider, every Spiritcraft payoff still fires for the original caster, so the machinery they built keeps turning while the payload arrives somewhere they never intended. That is the precision this offers and a counterspell does not: peel an attempted kill off your own creature and put it on theirs, scatter a targeted effect into the air, or turn a carefully sequenced chain back on its owner without disrupting a single trigger along the way. Crucially, this is a reactive answer that demands nothing of your own list. It cares only about the spell on the stack being Arcane, not about anything you are casting, so it costs you no deckbuilding commitment to slot in. The catch sits with your opponent: redirection only matters when they are casting Arcane spells worth redirecting, and the subtype was confined to a single block's worth of cards, never spreading wide enough to give this a reliable target across the wider card pool. A clean, low-cost answer with a deliberately narrow keyhole to fit through.