Without books and trying to take mind off donating blood at Red Cross.
Flawless Magic automatically grants you spell mastery level 1 to any spell you learn, and doubles the effect of learning further spell mastery levels.
A major virtue.
Is there a minor virtue that lets you learn spell mastery quicker?
Something like an Affinity with all spell mastery, so you learn with 50% extra?
There's Mastered Spells, that gives you 50 Xp to spend on Spell Mastery, however you see fit.
A one-off bonus at character creation that I am familiar with from the main book.
Hoping there might be an ongoing bonus in one of the supplementary books, not unlike an Affinity.
None am aware of
Not for all of your spells, no.
You could take an affinity, but since each spell has it's own mastery (pseudo-)skill, you'd need a lot of those.
Probably the best I can do, is point you towards independent study from HoH: MC, which generates extra XPs from practice and stories. In my experience, these tend to be the main sources for mastery XPs.
It's not what you want, but it might help? Or not at all, depending on your saga.
Personally, I would allow a minor virtue that grants a bonus to all spell masteries, but probably along the lines of Linguist, granting a 25% bonus instead of the 50% of an Affinity.
Edit: This minor virtue would be incompatible with Flawless Magic. No double dipping.
I'd be kinder just because of how mastery works. The first level is the most important, and that is one season for most people, virtue or not.
Assuming no mastery books or a teacher (and I consider that a fair assumption as they are generally rare) it's only until level 3 there is an advantage, 5 seasons instead of 6.
I'd think 50% is required to make the virtue worthwhile. A season is saved if going to level 2 ( 2 seasons instead of 3) and 2 seasons for level 3 (4 seasons instead of 6).
By the same reasoning, those most likely to take such a virtue are those who are interested in several masteries on some spells, in which case it becomes quite valuable.
I did elaborate to say a 25% boost will not assist before mastery 3, and even then it means it takes 5 instead of 6 seasons. Seems a weak virtue.
As someone mentioned earlier, there is the virtue of starting with 50 XP of mastered spells. A 25% boost would means only after 200 XP of mastered spells was achieved, would there begin to be an advantage of taking the 25% boost virtue instead of the 50 XP virtue, thus my thinking 50% seems a more balanced point.
If you create such a virtue, you should account for someone combining it with independent study, in which case the benefit manifests from rank 2 on
The virtue's value also depends on the availability of tractatus on spell mastery, or teachers of the same.
The point is that since Spell Mastery is a seperate ability for each spell, then the analogue of Linguist seems closer to the mark than Affinity.
If you troupe allows Affinity with Spell Masteries, then so much the better for you. But if it doesn't, then you could present a minor virtue similar to Linguist as an alternative.
Keep in mind that Independent Study, increase your Practice xp from 5 to 7, which is a 40% increase when you Practice Spell Mastery. And if you havd Flawless Nagic, it's doubled to 14 xp per season of Practice.
Wouldn't 50% have been more balanced for linguist as well? Yet 25% is canon.
200xp is a massive investment, and well-travelled is available if you just want 50xp.
I'd say that the point is that Flawless Magic provides you with both:
a) a free level of mastery whenever you learn the spell (including at character creation), and
b) a 100% (not 50%) bonus to all xps spent on spell mastery.
You get all this for 3 Virtue points.
I'd say, echoing Lee, that a) and b) are worth roughly the same.
But even if you assume that b) is worth twice as much as a), i.e. 2 Virtue points, then a Minor Virtue providing a "half-power" version of b) (a 50% bonus to all mastery xp) would not be overpowered at all. A Minor Virtue providing only a "quarter-power" version of b) (a 25% bonus) would certainly be underpowered.
Yes, I'd say Linguist is too weak for a Minor Virtue. Whoever came up with Linguist obviously thought "hey, since it's like an Affinity, but it applies to all languages, let's halve the bonus". However, the issue is that Affinity is balanced for someone who'll dump a whole pile of xps into a single skill/art taking it to an exceptional score, while a linguist's role is knowing a lot of languages at a level common to a lot of people. So, Linguist would indeed be more balanced at +50% than at +25%.
...and as mentioned elsewhere, FFM is extremely powerful, possibly too good.
However, that was hard to predict, given the changes to Mastery between editions.
Some people have indeed said so (about Flawless Magic, not FFM i.e. Flexible Formulaic Magic), but it's certainly not a consensus view. Furthermore, the more extreme examples of Flawless Magic optimization are those that really milk the first free mastery for all it's worth, not the 100% bonus to additional xps.
The issue is that, while a few xps spent on spell Mastery are definitely useful, additional ones beyond a certain threshold are far less so. So a Virtue that increases by a certain percentage all xp spent on Mastery starts to pay off a lot in terms of xps / seasons saved exactly when those xps, while nice to have, are no longer really worth that much.
It's like a 3% tax break on personal incomes above 1 million Euros; while it means a bonus of at least 30 thousand Euros per year, it is not that big of a deal, because to people in that income bracket it is not worth that much.
I think this idea would work very well in my games, but I also use a house rule of skill categories being applicable where the same base skill covers multiple specializations, such as affinity with craft covering all* crafts instead of just one. Given that premise this just makes sense for my settings, I can't really comment for other settings.
That thing would be not-a-penny for incomes of 1 million.
You'd need 2 millions to get your 30k.
How powerful FM is really depends on the individual Magi and Saga. You have to learn lots of spells and put lots of points into Spell Mastery. That ability to avoid Stress rolls is a major factor, but if a Magi only has a few spells they care about they can get that without sinking a Major Virtue into it. The reduced Warping a Magi gains is a major boon in a long running Saga.
Granted it is only my person experience, but I have found any spell/ritual that an individual Mastery is beneficial in (rather than just the general benefit of Mastery) often is even more benefited by multiple levels. You can often end up with effects which seem totally different from the original spell.