Elementals, Wastes of Nuyen? Options

[Walknuki]

Something that's been bugging me about Shadowrun is Elementals for Mages. To me they seem prohibitively expensive. If you try to conjure a force six spirit with six levels in Conjuring. You'll roll about one service from it, and it'll cost you a cool $6,000 nuyen. You can use one service from it and then it's gone forever.

Basically a $6K grenade.

Even if you lower it to Force four it's still alot less powerful and you'll only get an extra one or two services out of it.

So what's the big deal with them? Why would you want to spend the time and energy trying to summon up these cash guzzlers?

One theory I have is that with the Aid Sorcery service, after the Spirit is reduced to 0 and vanishes, you can recall the spirit with an exclusive complex action and have it go back to Aiding Sorcery without expending another service. This would make it much much more useful.

I could see summoning up some force two and three elementals to get those few dice out of them for a whole run (and not just a single spell), and having different types of elementals bound for different spells.

Is that how it works, or does it take a whole new service after it gets reduced to 0 and gets Recalled to get your Elemental Aiding Sorcery again?

Is there something else I'm missing? Something I'm not getting? Please let me know. Convince me that Elementals are a good investment for a SR Team and not a waste of nuyen.