This is certainly a build-around, and one you have to really go hard on to see benefits. Like most R&D departments, there are a lot of costs before you get a payoff, though the payoff is quite big. It’s also great that it fuels itself, as once you start drawing cards, you find more spells, and so on, with each jump-start spell counting twice (that, I believe, is the joke). Eventually you’ll have enough cards that you just start building a bomb, as most respectable research does, and this ends the game nicely too. I will enjoy playing with this, though I’d want 10+ spells, and for a few of them to have jump-start, before I started getting really excited.