Embarassing newbie tales? Do tell, do tell. I'm all ears.
A prestige class focused on metamagic (which isn't a great theme in the first place, never mind how unnecessarily convoluted the wording was) and a wizard spell which was supposed to serve as an insurance policy (it basically let you activate it and swap back and forth between a half-dozen utility spells--Blur, Feather Fall, Protection from Arrows, etcetera--but was 7th level and had a 20,000gp focus). So the incantatrix and Contingency/Craft Contingent Spell made it all utterly worthless. A bit of detective work will dredge them up, if you're in need of some blackmail material.
Fortunately, the spell was never touched again and after a while some other guy made so many changes to the prestige class that it was no longer recognizable. They actually made it worse, which was impressive--one of the changes was the removal of an epic progression because "we don't want to give the rules lawyers any more ammo" and the addition of key ability scores for class skills because "these are important when deciding what prestige classes to take." It got a laugh out of me, at least.
It does make me wonder what I'd do if I rewrote both of them now, though. Probably make the spell into a wizard-specific answer for Arcane Fusion (not that the wizard needs any more love) and scrap the concept for the prestige class entirely--metamagic has been done to death and there wasn't a clear focus to the class beyond that. Might salvage scraps of the mechanics, but the new version would likely bear no resemblance to the old.
Anyway, back on topic: The Firesled sounds like a better option. It's expensive, but it doesn't take ten minutes to pull out of your pack. You're already getting it at a discount by having it crafted; see if you can slash the price further by cutting the Fireball/Scorching Ray off if that's a bit out of reach.