I liked that equipment could only be revealed by targeting the mage - and thus effects like Obscure on the mage could prevent equipment removal. But Crumble (and Corrosive Orchid) changed things; now equipment is more like another type of enchantment, minus the instant reveal that makes enchantments really good.
I liked your reasoning here. What is the difference between equipment and enchantments? Which one should be easier to remove? The answers to these questions should drive what is being targeted and what the spell costs are.
If you imagine how a "real" battle would go, I would however argue the other way around. You should be able to target equipment directly without targeting the mage. After all these are things he has on himself or holds in his hands.
On the other hand, enchantments are supposed to be magical alterations that mages produce. It would be "logical" to me if enchantments would require targeting the mage. This would be even more obvious if all enchantments had something like upkeep cost or disperse on them, which would underline that the mage's attention is needed to keep them active.
Enchantments that do not require upkeep/disperse would then be in fact conjurations. These would be objects that are created from magic and then become independent from the mage who conjured them.
But looking at the way Mage Wars has evolved enchantments, equipment and conjurations, in a relentless effort to offer us something excitingly new, everything has started to get attributes of everything. Now we have equipment with their own action or that act as enchantment. We have conjurations that act like creatures or display incantation-like behavior, we have enchantments that act like equipment and incantations that cannot be stopped by enchantments that were probably originally designed to stop those incantations and enchantments.
So everything is already blurred and the desire to keep things "pure" is probably already a lost case.
So I guess the best option we have is to go with the flow and take things as they are and as they are being offered to us and accept the fact that even despite the fact that the differences between equipment, enchantments and conjurations have started to blur, our imagination can still play along.
Maybe in a new future game the scope and restrictions of equipment, creatures, enchantments, incantations and attack spells can be thought out in advance and can be kept pure while evolving. But note, that this is much easier now based on the experience with Mage Wars then it was before Mage Wars saw the light. On the other hand, do we really want conjurations that cannot attack? Do we really want to add armor through equipment and not through enchantments? Do we really want upkeep cost or disperse on every enchantment?
