With Crackling Doom and Foul-Tongue Invocation seeing far less play right now, the Mauler is going to be nigh unkillable for most decks
Spawn of Thraxes is kind of a backup to Themberchaud
You can use effects like Gaea's Blessing and Endurance to shuffle key pieces back into your deck to tutor or redraw later
Decks that want to play counters are almost always control decks, and control decks would much prefer to gain life rather than cause opponents to lose life, so all things being equal they would have preferred to play with Absorb but there were other considerations that forced most of them down the black road instead
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But the last 15 years haven't been especially kind to Jace, with its downfall being sealed when it was finally unbanned in Modern only to see essentially zero play in the format