death curse creativity

Q: (GnosisRoads (http://www.jimbutcheronline.com/bb/index.php?action=profile;u=1822), December 11, 2006) What death curses are able to do? How powerful can they be? Why don’t more wizards just use die as their curse? Its short and kills your killer.
A: They sometimes do.  See what happened to all the vampires around Simon when they assaulted his compound immediately prior to the onstage events in Summer Knight.
However, while taking your killer down with you might be the most immediately gratifying thing to do with a death curse (assuming that they haven’t up and prepared to defend against that kind of magical retaliation, which only a real moron *wouldn’t* do if they knew they were off to murder a wizard), it might not be the SMARTEST thing you could do with it.  Still, magic in the Dresden universe is only as formidable as a wizard’s imagination can make it.
I mean, Maggie’s death curse on Raith did /more/ than render him virtually powerless.  It freaking crippled the entire White Court by rendering its head executive suddenly unwilling to get aggressive.  It took that same executive’s focus and warped it from an outwardly-oriented expansionist agenda (What, did you really think Raith just bumped into Maggie at a /bar/ somewhere?) to one of frantic power-defense, paranoia, and infighting.  Had she merely killed Raith, another vampire much like him would simply have stepped into his shoes.  Instead, her curse sandbagged the entire White Court for two or three /decades/.
It isn’t until the events of White Night that the White Court really begins to . . .
. . .but perhaps I’ve said too much.
Anyway, Maggie’s curse, of course, also made Raith suffer.  Horribly.  It made him live in a constant state of drug-withdrawal-level hunger, and fear, and eventually reduced him to outright slavery to someone with centuries of comeuppance to dish out.  But that was just icing on the cake.

Jim