I don't know if it's true, but I heard from a German Mage wars player (think it was aridigas) that the German distributor is trying to keep a drastically slower release schedule
I don't believe that's true.
Imho, Pegasus Spiele is taking their time for two (or three) reasons:
1) to keep costs down, they wait to send cards to the printers until they can combine the order with others.
2) translating Mage Wars cards into German is tricky. You need someone who's very knowledgable in the game _and_ with good language skills. You must take care that any and all keywords are translated consistently. And I bet there's a lot of correspondence between them and Arcane Wonders to make sure they interpret cards and rules correctly.
3) partly as a consequence of 1) & 2), Pegasus Spiele makes good use of the delay by incorporating errata. This may paradoxically result in correct cards being released earlier than their English equivalent. Sometimes there are additional benefits, e.g. German expansions were already released using the improved packaging that Arcane Wonders came up with Forged in Fire, IIRC.
I'd further like to stress why I prefer the German version:
- It's half the price of the English version (most likely due to the costs to import it).
- I can play it with everyone here, not just with players who are fluent in English - and make no mistake, you need a pretty good grasp of English to understand the often long and rather complicated card texts correctly.