Hard to say. -1 magic equals almost 3 boxes of drain for a caster, without the fear of going down. I would say -1 magic equals 2 boxes of stun drain.

For banishing foci you also have to declare a spirit type for it to be effective against when you purchase/bond with it. Personally I wonder if anyone in their right mind would do this. That has got to be the most worthless foci out there unless they change it to a type of foci that is good against all spirits. I mean how often are you going to see the same spirit type, unless you GM has a penchant for using one kind?

Really? We should poll this. I'm curious.

I personally see this as a way of cheating characters out of their innate abilities. I probably wouldn't do this for NPCs. And I was under the impression that most Shadowrun folks seem to regard the "services" as rather mundane everyday affairs.

Personally, I'm thinking of writing up rules for my home campaign so that spirit summoning isn't a mundane occurance, but rather you need a spirit as a contact, and then you need to negotiate for your services. (In fact, this "services rule" might be a good guidelines to use for other contacts, too... definitely worth some thought). Anyway, I'm ranting...

Yes. Infrequently to be certain, but it happens. It's a good way (well, the only way) to get access to bound spirits that your tradition doesn't normally do. So a Hermetic Mage can use it to summon, and then bind a Loa of Damballah, allowing that Mage access to a spirit with Possession and Divination - two things his tradition doesn't normally do.

The drain is very high - at least as much as summoning the spirit an extra time and way more dangerous. But since you otherwise cannot gain control of 15 different kinds of basic spirits, it's always worth considering.

I will say that many magicians don't gotta catch 'em all, and probably should just give the entire sphere of banishment a pass. Attacks of Will are drain free, but so dangerous that I can't suggest making a habit out of that either.

-Frank

I only have spirits use Edge to resist summoning in three very specific cases: 1) the magician is a known spirit abuser (depending on how bad the magician is, they can and do use it all the time), 2) the magician is summoning a particular spirit whose personality dictates that they hate summoning, and most importantly 3) the player is pissing me off

In all fairness, I must say in the example I gave #3 would likely come into play

That seems to be a rather artificial benefit, though.

Besides, where does it say, that this actually works?

The rules for Summoning state, that only the five types of spirits of the tradition can be summoned by a magician. Banishing states, that the spirit can be summoned before it departs (by any magician in the vincinity, not only by the banisher even), but does that really negate the Summoning rule, that restricts it to certain types?

Just because the banisher can try to summon the spirit doesn't mean, that this suddenly works with types outside his or her tradition IMHO.

Bye
Thanee

Of course Adepts can use Banishing; You need a Magic Rating (wich they have) and the skill... which they can learn, same as anybody.