Conjure Minor Elementals is THE spell carrying the concept into the mid tiers of play. If you’re willing to work with your DM, sink in the time, manage swaths of creatures’ abilities, and issue hyper specific commands, you’ll find this spell will satisfy your craving for conjuration.

Have you ever wanted to cast Banishment and Protection from Evil and Good at the same time? If so, may I introduce Dispel Evil and Good, a worse combined version of both!

Divination is a superbly designed spell. If you’re looking to glean information, it does what its upper level counterparts largely fail to do; it offers relevant information in small doses hard capped without literally killing the player to use (cough cough Contact Other Plane cough cough).

Dominate Monster can be a work around for when you can’t otherwise get access to specific magic. Did your cleric die in an unfortunate freak accident involving a pool of black pudding? Find yourself a deva, bend its mind to your will, and just like that you’ve got resurrection magic on hand.

Feeblemind takes an exciting, horrific fantasy of lobotomizing a foe and handles it in the worst possible way. As an 8th level spell, either a group builds an entire encounter around landing it successfully once, or it ceases to function against meaningful enemies.

Flesh to Stone exists as a spell for DMs to fairly eventually petrify players. In the hands of a player character, it is the hottest of hot garbage.

Toll the Dead is the edgy church-y penance spell that ties a lot of tropes from religious fantasy into D&D. Flaying demons with a sonorous church bell is a hyper niche fantasy; nothing about this spell fulfills that fantasy to me, nor does it really succeed on the “impending doom” fantasy it otherwise is emulating.

Fireball trivializes any encounter relying on groups of small creatures, and requires from this point forward a DM can challenge a group that can instantly kill all creatures in a 40 ft. sphere with 15 hit points or less, 30 if they’re bad at Dex saves.

Illusory Script doesn’t really need to exist. You have to really stretch to find meaningful ways to use this, and almost always there will be mundane means of getting the same results or magical ways of doing it easier, faster, and better.

Detect Good and Evil simply points to creatures if they’re near you and lets you know what their type is. Chances are, you can figure out the devil trying to kill you is in fact a devil. You don’t really need this effect.

Sleet Storm does look pretty dope. It's a giant cylinder of freezing rain and hail that locks down an 80 ft. wide area. That’s a MASSIVE amount of space. What it does in that area is… fine? Compared to Fear and other 3rd level condition spells, this will act as an area of effect lockdown. My only issue with it is when do you want this specific lockdown?

Blinded creatures can’t see, automatically fail ability checks requiring sight, make attack rolls with disadvantage, and grant advantage to enemy attacks against them. Deafened creatures can’t hear, and automatically fail any checks that require hearing.

Beacon of Hope is next to never worth casting. It's dressed up with exciting words like MAXIMUM, but those words don’t mean a whole lot in the context of actually playing the game.

Ice Storm isn’t it. It's a 4th level damaging spell that doesn’t deal nearly enough damage, and a 4th level area of effect control spell that doesn’t have nearly enough control elements to justify the cast.

At its best, Dancing Lights lights up three twenty foot areas around a dark room somewhere deep in a dungeon for a single action. Oftentimes this isn’t going to be worth an action, especially in initiative, but in some rare cases you’ll find creatures using darkness to weaponize special abilities that are majorly hindered.

While you definitely don’t need Locate Animals or Plants, it being a ritual spell makes it a fairly easy pickup for druids before going off on the quest to locate some monstrous wolf causing mayhem around the hamlet. Being a prepared caster makes it an easy option to get when you’d want it, and won’t ever cost you a spell slot.

If you’re not taking it for memes, you probably don’t want Harm. It is a 14d6 single target damage option with the weird caveat of leaving the hit target at 1 if they’d otherwise drop. This alongside how the spell hits maximum hit points makes it clear it's built as a unique challenge for players to come up against more so than a spell for players to pick up and use.

Burning Hands is the 1st level Fireball. This is the damage to area standard every other spell at this level has to look towards to compete with. You’re getting a minimum of half of 3d6 damage to however many creatures you can fit in the cone for a 1st level slot; that’s big game at 1st level.

Why healing is so bad is it doesn’t actively contribute to reducing your opponents actions, nor does it necessarily give you an action advantage. At its best, heal COULD eat two, three, or even four actions from the enemy team should each attack deal a small amount of damage.

From a player’s perspective, at its best this is the most convoluted way to control somebody. You have access to Suggestion, Seeming, Dominate Person, Polymorph, and so many more spells that give you the ability to look, sound, and feel like somebody you're not or control the exact person you want.