Any wall can be attacked with a melee attack. For Wall of Fire, as you noted, incorporeal rules apply.

WoF has no inherent counter-strike. If it did, there would be a notation after its quick strike attack.

Hope this helps.

I have taught this game to at least 10 different people since getting it at Gen Con.  Learning to teach it is an evolving process, as is learning to play it.  

There is no question as the owner and the experienced player, you have an advantage.  Furthermore, since you have built your opponent's spell book, you have another advantage.

To mitigate these circumstances, and after some experimentation with teaching, it is now my standard practice to allow my opponent at least fifteen minutes, or longer if they need, to pore over their spell book after I've explained the basic ruleset to them.  I also offer to let them look over my spell book if they would like to.

At that point, as they have quite a few questions about card abilities and traits, I provide them with the codex and tell them to just look up terms they don't understand before asking me during play.  That way,  they are giving me less information about their plans.  If they have questions during Planning that cannot be answered by the codex, I ask them to please wait until I have selected my cards, so that my selection is not influenced.

Finally, I try to not let my opponent do anything too unwise.  I don't want to play their game for them, but new players inevitably do something they will really regret.  

This seems to have worked well so far.  Virtually everyone I have taught seems very interested by the game.  

As an aside, there is no need to use proxies.  All the cards you need to build two of the stater spell books at at a time are in the box.  

I keep two modified books together, and then the other two mages I store as a deck with notes about cards I had to "borrow" from them so I can quickly rebuild them if someone wants to play those mges instaed of the ones already in the books.

Hope this helps.

Channeling is not a trait.

Mana flower and mana crystal do stack, as do all things which provide increased channeling.

I'm in Madison. Close-ish  

There are, I believe, four different temples. I dont have my cards in front of me, but the holy spawnpoint, Bim-Shala, damage temple (remember, that structure is itself a temple and gets an attack die for itself), and one other that lets you re-roll dice under certain circumstances, pump the damage temple to four fairly quickly.

I've used a temple spell book twice, and it runs fairly well IMO.

Page 31 explains damage barriers in detail.

To answer your question, yes...traits on either creature (defender or attacker) can modify the damage barrier roll.

On another note, damage barrier is not a counter attack.  That is an entirely separate step in the attack sequence.

Damage barriers and counter attacks are different in two important ways. Damage barriers only go off if the attacker does damage to the defender, counter attacks go off regardless. Second, damage barriers go off even if the attacker does enough damage to kill the defender. Counter attacks do not.

Hope this helps.

I haven't tried this tactic, but my initial thought is that throwing a pentagram out early may not be your best move.

For one thing, it's terribly expensive, especially for a Mage who generates less mana than other mages.  For another, it works best when you a already have creatures on the board to enhance its mana generation.

I might consider some low cost creatures and a lash in the early turns.  This will allow you to save up a bit of mana (the idea being that you will use your warlock as a melee creature early on).  Then cast your pentagram and perhaps another small creature to help pump up your pentagram.