I thought that's what they all called Fern's spells? Like she's just using "Magic Missile" and "Shield," stuff that's been around decades before she was born. Other mages are using newer spells, some of them personal inventions.
This of course is why Fern is such a powerful mage. Quantity is a quality of its own. She can spam spells faster than other people. It's like she has a deck of 20x Lightning Bolts, 20x Ancestral Recalls, and 20x moxen while everyone else is using the most convoluted combo jank you've ever seen.