I’ve went through a mental exercise of evaluating all spells in a game as Jurisdiction targets.
I’ve came to a conclusion, that, for a Jurisdiction to be a legit teching option, the following has to happen:
- You have spells in Codex that are situationally powerful, but are not flexible/versatile, or it’s easier to just tech them in;
- That situational power has to be… Game-turning. So much so that you might be willing to overpay 2g for it;
- The niche of those spells must not be easily predictable, otherwise you’d just tech the real copies in;
- It can’t be a part of a multi-spell combo;
- It can’t be a channeled spell;
- You have SEVERAL of those spells in Codex, otherwise teching Jurisdiction is strictly worse than teching single copy of your situational spell;
- Another use-case is if you are building your entire strategy around a single spell and you really want to have a backup Bigby available since your main caster is likely to be knocked off, but don’t want to tech in 2 copies of the key spell. I’ve only came up with Free Speech and Bloodlust in this niche.
So far I’ve narrowed it down to Ready or Not, Now!, Entangling Vines, Thunderclap, Free Speech, Unphase, Assimilate, Nether Drain, Kidnapping, maaaaybe Temporal Distortion and Bloodlust.
If your gut reaction to this list is “Why is spell XXX not part of it?”, it means that in my opinion, it’s either:
- Flexible, usually easy to find a use for, so you’re better off just teching it, i.e. Shadowblade, Bloodlust.
- Is almost never powerful enough to warrant 2g overpay, i.e. 6g Doom Grasp no thanks.
- Usually is telegraphed/predictable well before it actually becomes necessary, i.e. Free Speech, Carrion Curse, Temporal Distortion, so you tech the real copy instead.
- Is probably a part of a multi-spell combo, i.e. Hallucination or Spreading Plague.
You can see how those few spells that might make Jurisdiction worth it sorta coalesce in Present, Strength and maybe Blood or Future.
Honestly, just looking at this list of imo best use-cases for Jurisdiction, it feels like 2g Jurisdiction is… extremely niche, and even in that niche is probably more of a desperation move than a winning strategy.
Now, imagining 1g Jurisdiction… Makes those cases at least somewhat attractive as a real strategical option of “Making sure to not get caught with my pants off because I can’t make a good call to commit to a single option from my toolkit of situationally powerful Geiger/Drakk spells”.