The usefulness of Create Food And Water depends greatly on the type of game your DM is running. Some DMs don’t track food at all, making this spell nearly worthless. Others have their players carefully track the amount of rations and number of waterskins they’re carrying, and have the characters suffer when they go too long without food or drink.

Magic Circle foundationally is a protection tool on its own. When paired with other summoning effects or entrances to other worlds, it can act more as a negotiation table. The best diabolists of their time would spend thousands of gold on these just to study and learn the tricks and tools needed to control unstable, often hostile, extra-planar threats.

At its best, Protection from Energy on a paladin keeps them up from a breath weapon once, guaranteed, and sometimes that’s good enough to prepare. The majority of the time, you’ll have way better options than this.

What sets Conjure Animals apart from other conjuration effects is how cheap it is, and how early it affects the game. A 3rd level slot for eight extra allies is crazy. Even using a 5th to get SIXTEEN extra creatures can wildly debilitate higher CR encounters.

Meld Into Stone is a delightful spell effect, but my god is it overcosted. Being able to instantly hide in any stone environment for up to eight hours is a neat trick, but not particularly applicable in the vast majority of environments.

At its best, Speak with Plants will tend to feel like a hybrid Entangle and Speak with Animals, two first level spells. Speak with Animals is a ritual spell, notably, so more like one and a half first level spells. A 3rd level spell slot for that effect is a terrible rate, meaning if you want this to perform at a moderate level, you need your DM to be liberal with their rulings on what the plants can do.

A ten minute cast time and lack of clear rules as to what exactly Mirage Arcane can do leave it as a world building tool more so than an actual practical tool for players.

Fundamentally this spell is offering you a fear effect akin to a dragon’s frightful presence or a compulsion to move towards an object for up to ten days. I can’t conceive of ways in the majority of games I’ve run or played in where I would want to spend an hour and my 8th level slot doing this kind of thing.

If unbridled, high variance chaos is what you’re looking for, Confusion is pretty disappointing. If you’re instead looking to lock down three to four creatures with one save or die, Confusion can mostly deliver on that.

Giant Insect may imply it makes a single insect very large, but in reality this spell is closer to Summon Beast than it is to Enlarge/Reduce. You pick from four creature types grouped together to get a whole bunch of loyal insects ready to lay down their lives for you and fight till the bitter end for ten straight minutes.

Hallucinatory Terrain should be a bigger version of that, it should be an up-cast mass area that deceives everyone around it. In practice, it's just a bit too clunky to see ready use, and doesn’t offer enough more than other big illusion spells to get cast over them.

The reality of Water Walk is crossing liquids as if they were solids just isn’t that great when teleportation and flight are readily available. You can conjure bridges with magic when needed. Even for a ritual, the time necessary to solve this problem that can be solved just as well with a decent skill check just results in the spell having too small a window of power to ever be considered.

But looking at Water Walk like this barely scratches the surface of what it can do.

Even with its suspect practicality, Speak with Dead opens up a world of roleplay possibilities I adore. If you want to play a character that speaks to the departed, this spell can play a major role in satisfying that fantasy.

Dimension Door is one of those rare and beautiful spells that only require a verbal component. So long as you can speak, you can retreat, and take your best friend with you.

But this spell isn’t limited to cowardly flights; in the hands of somebody bolder, it's the ultimate tool of “SURPRISE!”

Contagion is a hit or do nothing effect in the first place; if you miss the one attack Contagion offers, this spell does nothing. If you do it, the creature starts making death-like saving throws, three successes ending the poison, three failures develops the poison into a disease.

Every wizard with room in their spell book and prepared list should have Contingency on it, simply because it expands your in-game resources like a class feature would do.

Don’t cast Phantasmal Killer. Sure, it sounds cool and edgy and invokes the feeling of a twisted mental mage torturing their foes with their worst nightmares, but if you want that, just take Phantasmal Force. Don’t waste your time on Phantasmal Killer.

Eyebite is a modern example of how to do save or sucks. It harkens to older versions of itself by offering repeatable lockdown, and can have massive encounter implications, but unlike the one attempt on cast save or sucks, Eyebite has a higher floor on its utility. Even if the first monster succeeds on the save, you still have access to the magic for a full minute to take out other creatures.

Animate Objects is the kind of spell you’ll find nearly endless applications for including mass murder. Here are some basic ways to use the spell to its maximum depending on the size of objects you want to animate.

The idea behind Antilife Shell is epic; a veil of force that keeps life out feels like it belongs with the edgy necromancer or introvert illusionist. You may want to take the spell for the aesthetic; that's a valid thing to do, just hear my warning and be aware it will fail you in more ways than one when you need it most.