How to Rend Fiends and Immolate People: A Guide to Sorcery

[Tanarii]

right, but if you have time to prepare a pitched battle, you have time to prepare one with a shovel and use your cantrip slot for something that's better than occasionally preparing for a pitched battle.

There is a world of difference between what you can do in 2 minutes with a shovel and two minutes with Mold earth. The latter is going to give you a 5ft deep ditch with a five foot pile of earth behind it that's 60 ft long. Or double depth/height and 30ft long. A shovel won't even give you a 5 ft pit.

Mage Hand is situational because its ability to affect the world around you in any meaningful way is incredibly limited. Your ability to pick up something from a short distance away will have very little effect on anything that happens in the game. There are certainly going to be situations in which it will be important to the way a game continues, but those are few and far between.

In the average campaign, Mage hand should be the third cantrip any class with it on the class list takes, right after an attack cantrip and Minor Illusion. It's that useful to be able to pick something up from a limited distance away. Mage hand should be blue in a general guide.

I feel like you're playing 5e mostly as a series of battles, and building a sorcerer guide based on that. for example, rating message as purple (typically means low or limited situational use). The situations in which message can be useful are common enough in average campaigns that aren't heavy combat focus to rate it black. Your heavy focus on twinned spell metamagic seems to indicate the same. Rating everything that's non-combat as 'situational' also shows your game style you're writing a guide to. You implied as much in your introduction by taking about blasty with utility, but you really need to just outright state that it's a guide for making heavily combat-focused sorcerers, not a general sorcerer guide. That'll cut down on the number of counter augments you're going to get.

Edit: made my post less antagonistic, and more pointing out what I see as the source of disagreement.