I know on some other boards there has been some discussion of the game length and shorting it up. As a general rule I don't think this is necessary as I believe 2 things to be true.
1) As people play the game more, it will speed up because the fact is that it's a rich and complex (in a good way) game that will reward and encourage replay.
2) Many people's assumptions on how long the game should take are based on limited plays and preconceived ideas of how long this game should take because it uses cards. If a game takes 2 hours and you expected it to take 1 hour having never played it, that doesn't mean it took too long. It might mean your playing a Mage Wars and not another game.
Still, I can see a desire to occasionally play a shorter game. Sometimes I might only have an hour, and I want to get a game in and feel like it will finish. As a Warmachine player, a normal game will take 2-2 1/2 hours. If I only have an hour, but have a hunkering to play Warmachine, I can simply adjust the points level down from 35 to 25 or even 15. To translate this to Mage Wars I see adjusting life totals as a better solution that adjust deck point totals. Have any of you tried lowring both mage's life totals by X? If so, how did it go and how much did you adjust it? Does the lower starting total break some parts of the game? Maybe no one has experimented with this yet since the game is so new, but I thought I'd ask.