So, I'm told this is a good card. My fellow CFB writers are all over his value, so despite Cedric Phillips' downcheck on this new take on Jace, I'm inclined to believe that it genuinely is.
That said, I suspect this also means I won't be spending much time writing about it in terms of playing it. This is partly my own contrarian nature -- clearly, I don't just like playing the "best deck" over and over, so I end up taking quirky designs to tournaments. This is also partly the mandate of my column over at CFB, where I am not budget in the strictest sense, but tend to gnaw at a specific idea for a while. That way if a reader chooses to play the "In Development" home game, they don't end up swapping out super-expensive cards each and every week.
But as I said, not budget in the strictest sense. I still assume you're going to buy all the dual lands and fetches.
Finally, there's the fact that Jace seems okay to me, but isn't my style of gaming. This may seem curious since my favorite card ever is a blue card (cf this site's name), but I typically play that blue card in the context of decks that will rarely if ever counter a spell.
It does seem like Jace will be a tremendous problem when it's across the board from you. He can immediately go to 5 loyalty and then sit there, outside of Bolt range, Brainstorming each turn and bouncing creatures every so often.
That said, I don't know that I'd be happy as the control player to drop this Jace as soon as I could, so it feels like he's going to be a late-game icer, much like Cruel Ultimatum.
Of course, I'm saying this without testing him, which is a topic I'll be addressing in this week's In Development. My overall thought for the moment is that while Jace will be a big old sixty dollar bill, or worse, in the coming weeks, I won't be disappointed to not be running him in my decks. He's nifty, but for the moment, not my style.