Preface
Both the ignorant and the supposedly educated think that All Magic comes with a Price. Certainly that is true of serious magical bargains, the use of The Higher Magic's, and when magic is attempted by those not naturally gifted with magic, unlike The haughty High Elves, The Great Ones of the Older Races, The inscrutable Istari, The eco freaky Druids, The evil 'undead' Nazgul, amoral Daemon Lords such as Lord Zartan or The Source of All Evil, The dread Lords of the Daedra and The mighty Dragon Lords. Otherwise, it's just marketing hype, often put about by the puritanical 3M's religious party, Movement for the Moral use of Magic.
However, even among the magically educated, few but The learned Wizard Kings of Evermore and their allies The reclusive Dragon Lords, hoarders of ancient, arcane and just plain strange, lore, know that nothing magically comes out of nothing. You want to implant false memories - they have to come from someone else. You want to 'spin' lead into gold - somewhere you need some gold to make more gold; that's how The Seven Dwarven Rings made their wielders rich, although others say it just made their wielders better negotiators. You want to create a castle - you need to copy a real existing or past it's sell by date castle (or copy an exact model and use a scaling enchantment).
You want to create a whole town - you need an existing town (but any old set of ruins will do) as a template and it's really, really hard. It's not the sort of thing that any mere Imperial Archmage can set as a Ph.D. project.
So, Some Magic Needs A Template.