Quick question about the mechanics of magic loss due to essence loss in point buy character creation.

As I understand it, in priority or sum-to-ten you could, for example, get magic=4 due to your priority in magic, spend your resources on 2 essence worth of ‘ware, dropping your magic to 2, then use your free karma to buy your magic back up to 4 for (3+4)*5=35 karma.

In point buy I think that instead, if you wanted four magic and two lost essence, you’d just have to buy your magic up to six, then lose those two points of magic ‘off the top’. The effective cost being (5+6)*5=55 karma.

(Obviously in this game a useful magic rating would be higher than four, but I was using that for purposes of illustration.) Do I have that right that if I want ‘ware in my character, I have to lose the magic points off the top of what he’s purchased (potentially quite costly if trying to get to, say, magic 8 with a couple of essence of ‘ware, that is 95 karma of lost magic … I had a story worked out that was pushing me in that direction, but the cost is making me think twice).

On a totally different topic — anyone making a pure mage (i.e. can astrally project)? I’m still trying to decide on magic variant. With this many points to work with, mysad is tempting, but having at least one astral projector would be nice too.