Waking Nightmare

Hymn to Tourach set the bar that two-card discard has been measured against ever since: the same effect for one mana less, with the cruelty of random selection. Pushing the cost to three and stamping the Arcane subtype onto an otherwise plain discard sorcery tells you what the era prioritized. As a standalone hand-attack spell it is overpriced by the standards black had already established, but the Arcane tag was never about the rate of the discard itself. An Arcane spell is a host: other spells carrying splice onto Arcane can be revealed from hand and tacked onto this one as it resolves, so a single cast could resolve several effects at once, the discard anchoring the chain rather than being the chain. The base effect is deliberately unremarkable because the splice spells riding along carry the payoff, not the two cards stripped. Read outside that engine, it is a sorcery-speed, non-random, off-rate way to take two cards: a spell that scans fine and prices poorly. Targeted discard generally wants to be cheap and proactive, hitting before the opponent can deploy; at three mana the relevant card has usually already left the hand. What limits the design is exactly what defines it: the cost buys a seat in the Arcane chain, and that chain is the only reason to reach for this over the cheaper, meaner discard that came before it.