Jason pauses. The compliment appears.... genuine. Sincere. He's not entirely sure what to do with that, other than dismiss it as naïveté.

No, not quite right, nor fair. Ignorance, though. There is nothing, in Jason's view, commendable about his grim, slow study of magic over the centuries. He'd had no choice.

But the other man has no way of knowing this, and simply says his words with earnest decency.

It's very rare, that he is near people of such earnest decency. The 'heroes' of his world.... the heroes call him when they need him-- when something is too dark and hell-tainted for them to know how to handle it, when they want Etrigan unleashed against this or that horror-- and then when the threat has faded they are happy enough to let him leave and not have to deal with the fact that he makes so many of them uncomfortable.

"If you like," he says after several seconds' pause. "I... as you say, though, compatibility is... unknown. I would wager unlikely. I would hesitate to ask you to invest any effort on something not likely to work."

He nods and reaches for the deck. "Perhaps for the best to focus on that for now, yes. Are you familiar with the various spreads, then?"