Broad Question- How much should be in-school magic

[malgor]

General question.  As I build some decks I find myself gravitating more and more toward mostly using the magic school my mage specializes in, only deviating to other schools with utility spells.  

What percentage of your spells are in your mage's school/s of magic?  How many spells on average does one book need?

I feel like more is always better, and that every school has the cards you need to deploy just about any strategy.....but I'd like input from everyone else.

[Tacullu64]

I just did a quick check on a wizard book. It had 15 out of school spells that cost 34 spell points.

[The Dude]

General question.  As I build some decks I find myself gravitating more and more toward mostly using the magic school my mage specializes in, only deviating to other schools with utility spells.  

What percentage of your spells are in your mage's school/s of magic?  How many spells on average does one book need?

I feel like more is always better, and that every school has the cards you need to deploy just about any strategy.....but I'd like input from everyone else.

This can widely vary depending on what the mage is and how you want to build the book. Do you want it to be more reactive, but play the warlock? Then you are going to use far more out of school points than normal. I think the better question to ask is:

What is the number of points you would delegate to reactiveness, and what number of points would you delegate to activeness, where reactive means reacting to what your opponent is doing, and active means making your opponent react to what you are doing. Dig?

[malgor]

yes i dig, but still want to know what some people are averaging.

[sdougla2]

I tend to have over 20 spells from out of school in many of my builds. Some of those are novice spells, and I'm not sure if you count those.

[Tacullu64]

I tend to have over 20 spells from out of school in many of my builds. Some of those are novice spells, and I'm not sure if you count those.

I didn't count the novice spells in mine because there is not a penalty for putting then in your spellbook. If I did it would be 17 cards costing 36 spell points.

[sdougla2]

Not counting novice spells as out of school, here's what I've got from glancing through a few builds.

Earth Wizard: 15 spells out of school
Warlock: 25 spells out of school
Beastmaster: 27 spells out of school

Most of the out of school spells are level 1, so they're still not many spell points, but there are several level 2 spells in there as well, like Teleport.

[DarthDadaD20]

I attempt to have as many from the school that my mage is trained in as I can. There are those essentials though like Bear Strength and a huge bulk of the equipment as of right now that you just cannot do with out. Most decks I have use Battle Forge, and all the meta cards such as dispel, dissolve, nullify, block. After all the meta cards and cards I deem "Essential" I dont have a ton of points not to use the cards in my school.

And yes...Lv.1 spells are a good way to throw in some "tricks" from other schools with out breaking the bank.

[Shad0w]

Depends on the mage some builds run as high as 75%+ in school

[reddawn]

Competitively speaking, I don't think you can really afford to deviate too far from a mage's training.  A small spellbook is a vulnerable spellbook, because it either lacks the redundancy needed to enact a particular plan reliably and/or the in-school answers to get your mage out of a bad situation.

Casually, you can pretty much do whatever you want.  And as long as you're not unreasonably out-of-school, you can actually stand a decent chance against a competitive spellbook.  

And I don't think you'd have to go that far out of school to play a control Warlock.  The biggest book investment would probably be from the extra Mana Crystals you'd need and a Mage Wand to cast Drain Life over and over lategame.  The Warlock already has plenty of curses that outright control creatures the most efficiently of pretty much any school.

[Tacullu64]

I checked a beastmaster book and it had 24 spells at 53 spell points.

[malgor]

i have 17 in my warlock deck.  i'm a little worried about this guy bc the last few games i've gone without casting a single creature....it's working but it leaves no damn margin for error!