Ok here's a few strategies I've picked up. I play primarily Beast Master and one of my best friends is a necromancer.

1. Go with flyers. Turok and the Thunderift Falcon squad. Zombies can't hurt flyers generally speaking. Put a Nullify on to protect from Maim Wings or Drain Life.

2. Cheetah Speed and Mongoose Reflexes. Zombies start swarming you this lets you avoid them better.

3. Get in there and wail the stuffing out of the Necromancer. He'll be busy trying to get out as many zombies as possible.

4. Consider assigning a heavy hitting creature like your pet to start tearing into his Graveyard or other spawn area.

5. Dissolve his evil spawn book. Yeah he can put it back in his spell book but that costs him.

6. Yeah Unicorns are a good idea for countering IoP.

7. Put out your totems and keep those Call of the Wild cards ready.

8. Use cheap walls to slow down his zombie horde. They'll probably break the walls down but that's wasting time on their part. Time they could be using to chase after you.

I agree in that not having high monetary value prizes is cool, one of the things I enjoy about the game.

I think an alchemist would be an interesting mage to enter the arena. You could make him either Arcane representing the years of magical study they'd have had to of endured or War if you wanted to make them part tinkerer/engineer. There's certainly plenty of RPGs and fantasy settings with alchemist type classes in them.

Ideas for this mage:
-Potions that could put up temporary smoke clouds.
-Poison removal.
-Golems and other homunculi. Maybe a weird patch work man type thing.
-Acid attacks galore! Maybe even an acid wand?
-Wall dissolve.

I get that a lot of this stuff is covered partially(or even fully) with other schools but it's just an idea I had. random musing really.

I'd argue that an arcane mage who relies on nothing but arcane may be in trouble. Without some measure of healing you may end up in trouble. With out some buffs you're at a disadvantage. Curses are also VERY nice little presents as well. Also Arcane isn't much good that I've seen for dealing pure damage like the elemental schools(though of course a Wizard chooses one of those.)

That's not to say Arcane isn't important, because it is, but so are the other schools.

Yeah that would make sense.

Thank you Baron that's very interesting.

Going back to the OP about Walls, I don't think Unsummon was meant to be aggressive tempo but more an Undo button.

I think Unsummon on controlled objects may be plausible...

Wulfen I totally agree.....though my Bear Strengthed Grizzly really just wants to be your friend.....