The Harry Potter mechanic of the game bothers me a bit.

[Wiz-Pig]

I would like the comment however, that it sounds like you understand the real value of wands. Which is of course versatility, not efficiency. Having more strategic options can be a great thing, which is a huge part of the value of familiars as well.

[Brazil]

Okay, so I have now played many more games against a wider variety of opponents.   And I'll stand by my original assessment.    Wands are too powerful, and winning the wand battle, more often than not determines the outcome.

Here is the deal:   Having two wands ( Mage Wand & Elemental Wand ), allows you to do the following:

Cast unlimited numbers of any of the following spells:
Heal
Damage dealing spells (Direct Single Creature damage, Whole zone Damage, range 3 damage) by only having a single copy of each.
Dispel
Drain Power
Resurrection
Teleport
Disolve and/or Explode
Steal Enchantment
Steal Equipment
Force Push

Yes, initially it cost 5 extra mana, but the trade of is you only have to have one of each spell in your spell book to cast these spells an unlimited number of times.

This is TOO powerful.  Way too powerful.  The game creators limited level 1 spells to 6 of each, and spells above that to 4 of each.   But if you have it on a wand.....you can cast it a unlimited number of time.

Why this is critical:
1)  No, wand and you're limited to resurrecting 4 creatures.  With wand....no limit.  (This can end a game, when your opponent runs out of creatures, and you never do.

2) No wand and you can heal a limited amount.   If your opponent is trying to kill you with direct spell damage you can cast heal every turn (forever), and he will run out of attack spells.  (Then he loses)

3) No wand and you can teleport 4 times.  With wand - You can teleport every turn.  Arm if you have a damage dealing spell in one wand and teleport in the other, your opponent won't be catching you, and you can skirmish him to death.

4) Enchantments.   Anyone relying on enchantments to enhance himself or his creatures is boned if you can cast an unlimited number of "Steal Enchantments".  This also shuts down Curse Books - Put his own Curses on his own creatures or Mage.

5) Equipment. Anyone relying on equipment loses, when his opponent can cast an unlimited number of Dissolves, or worse Steal Equipments.  Or for more fun Explode everything he builds.

Wands are just way to effective, they allow you to be versatile and use strategies that completely shut down certain opposing spell books with only a few spells.

When I play with wands (If I win the wand battle)  I know that the only way I'm going to lose is if I lose the "creature swarm" battle early game.  And I build with this in mind, I can shut down all the other types of books listed above with a couple wands and only about 10% of my spell book.  I put 6 nullifies, and sometimes reverse magic in my deck and it all comes down to winning the wand battle.

[Aylin]

1. Wait, people run Resurrection? I have never played against a book that took this spell. Ever. Anyway, the game is not about killing more of your opponents creatures than s/he kills of yours. The game is about killing the other mage. You don't even need a single creature to do that (solo FM builds for example).

2. Why, exactly, is your opponent throwing attack spells at you every turn? That's never a good strategy. Attack spells are used for killing things (such as Fireball or Hurl Boulder), utility (applying Daze/Slam/Stun or Pushing for example), or to wipe out swarms/remove enemy guard tokens so you can hit the mage. The best way to apply damage is by using a creature's attack. If you want to cast heal every turn for that, be my guest. You're spending mana and I'm not. That greatly limits the stuff you can do.

3. All your opponent needs to catch you is Cheetah Speed, and Mongoose Agility if you have guards or are hindering in some way (only except is if you're Druid, but then you just need something that flies). And again, casting an attack spell every turn from an elemental wand is a pretty bad strategy.

4. Steal Enchantment is pretty expensive to cast (twice the casting cost and reveal cost, plus potential Magebind costs if the present target and/or new target is a mage). This doesn't exactly shut down a curse book, especially if that book is using Sectarus and Ring of Curses, since you're paying 2(x+2) where x is what they're paying. Plus they're, ya' know, hitting you.

5. Nullify and Armour Ward can help protect equipment.

6. To change the spell on your wand you have to spend a quick action and mana. This makes changing your bound spell difficult and time-consuming.

7. It doesn't matter if you have 6 Nullifies or 10 in your book; you can only place one on yourself at a time. If my opponent has a wand out and a face-down enchantment, I'm casting some incantation/enchantment I don't care about (most often Decoy) to remove the potential Nullify, then I dissolve your wand. The best you could do would be to cast Jinx on me first...which gives your Wand 1 more turn of living at best.

Wands can be powerful, but they're only worth it if you're playing for the long game and can expect to get there. But you're vastly overestimating them. Against a skilled opponent your wand won't last for more than 2 turns.

[MrSaucy]

I was going to say a lot but Aylin pretty much nailed it with the last post. I never use wands anymore and I don't regret it one bit. There are rarely any incantation/attack spells I feel like playing more than 4 times during a game anyways. Casting nothing but attack spells is predictable, ineffective, and mana consuming.

[Brazil]

Look, I base my Book on stopping opposing creatures...(and casing my own) 85-90% of my spell book is dedicated to that.   (Note, I'm not trying to be aggressive with creatures, I'm being defensive against creatures.)

The remaining 10-15% of my spell book is wands, and protecting wands, along with one each of the following:
Disenchant
Steal Enchantment
Drain Power
Resurrection
Teleport
Desolve
Heal
Force Push
(and about a half dozen damage spells of different types - Zone attack, long range attack(range 3), lightning, fire...etc)
Nullifyx6

That small 15% of my deck, because of the re-castability of those spells affords me a wide variety of strategies which can completely styme non-creature based attacks.

1) Resurection - Yes, on several occasions I've traded creatures with my opponent until we were both nearly out  of creatures.   Then I started resurrecting mine....and he ran out.....game over.

2) I played a match today where and opponent cast 3-4 creatures, and charged me with his creatures and Mage.   I used my creatures and Mage to defeat his creatures, and he attacked my mage, knocking me down to less than 10% health by the time I eliminated his wand (which had his only Dissolve), and his creatures.  I then cast heal on my self every turn as my creatures turned on him.  I was able to heal myself back to near full health, and he gave up.  He didn't have the resources to deal with what I had on the map.

3) "All you need is Cheetah speed", did you miss the part where I have "Steal Enchantment"?   Your Cheetah speed becomes my creature's Cheetah speed.  (as many enchantments as you cast, I can steal.)   I've noticed after you steal 2-3, opponent's wise up and quit casting Enchantments. (to avoid me stealing them)

4) have Disenchant in my book if I just want to get rid of an enchantment rather than bounce it back.  Plus if my opponent isn't trying to destroy my wand, guess what else Nullify works on?

5) Nullify and Armor ward - Yes I know.  I have both in my deck, I'm quite practiced at winning the Wand War.  The whole point of this post is, that the one who wins the wand war, is then in a situation with a huge upper hand because of the effectiveness of wands.

6) Yes, the Spell book I'm describing is not a "Fast win" spell book.  But it is a super effective defensive spell book, and the longer the game goes, the higher my chance of winning, as my opponent will start to run out of spells, and I NEVER will.  That's one of the strengths of the Wands.  LONG games, not short games.  Play things to drag out games and deal with creatures.   Then when your opponent runs out of resources, resurrect your creatures, and you still have an unlimited amount of direct damage...and you can get rid of all his equipment.  It's the unlimited number of all the utility and attack spells where this book has a huge advantage, I build the book to exploit that.   And it works.  It's easily my most effective spell book.  (I rarely lose with that book)

7) Again, you're talking about how to play "Wand Wars".   I assure you I am a very experienced veteran of "wand wars", there are lots of tricks to keep your wands safe and deal with your opponent's wands.   I'm not arguing about the best way to win "Wand Wars", what I'm saying is, "He who wins the Wand War, has a Major upper hand in the game".   If you blow up my wands, and still have your own, YOU have the upper hand.  That's my point ... whomever wins the wand war gains a huge advantage.     And about winning the wand war...it sounds like you guys don't think wands are that effective, does that mean you jammed your own spell book full of Dissolves, and Decoys, and whatever other suggestions you had for defeating a wand deck?   I assure you I put a solid amount of Wand Defense, and Wand destruction, in my deck.  (I can cast my ONE Dissolve an unlimited number of times), so you will run out of nullifies, and eventually you'll run out of all your equipment, when I dissolve all that too, while keeping my own.   That is why the Winner of the Wand War, has the huge upper hand.

That part of the game is just too important. (Or at least in my experience it seems to be)

[jacksmack]

7. It doesn't matter if you have 6 Nullifies or 10 in your book; you can only place one on yourself at a time. If my opponent has a wand out and a face-down enchantment, I'm casting some incantation/enchantment I don't care about (most often Decoy) to remove the potential Nullify, then I dissolve your wand. The best you could do would be to cast Jinx on me first...which gives your Wand 1 more turn of living at best.

Jinx and Nullify must both be revealed when you cast a decoy on the enemy mage (assuming jinx on you and nullify on the enemy.)

The only way to stop a dissolve for longer than 1 round is by having an enchant transfusion set up with a nullify on another creature.
(assuming that range and LOS is not an issue + the dissolver has an extra 4 mana for a potential armor ward)

[ACG]

Being able to cast the same spell multiple times is nice, but is only 'overpowered' if the game goes on for so long that both players use most of their spellbooks. This has happened to me only once, under unusual circumstances (I was trying to divide the board in half with a wall and turtle behind it. It didn't work). I think your experience may be due to your local metagame. It strikes me as odd that the creatures in your games suffer such high attrition rates  without taking out the mage - generally, I see creatures ignoring other creatures and going straight for the mage. If you and your opponents focus on taking out creatures first, this might explain why your games go on long enough to give an edge to the player that still has a wand. As for things like stealing enchantments and equipment those are very expensive to cast since they require a good amount of mana and one of your precious full actions - it sounds to me as though you have a substantial mana advantage, which suggests that your opponents are not being as aggressive in the early game as they should be.

That being said, one of my favorite wizard tactics is binding a drain power to a mage wand and then repeatedly draining my opponent. By the time I have the resources to do that, of course, I have already won, wand or no wand.

[ringkichard]

Watergate Wizard is this style book, so yes, control with wands is quite deadly. But Watergate abuses Wizard's Tower and Gate as well as wands, and I don't usually think of the wands as the real dangerous part of that book. I mean, you still have to spend your mage's action and pay the mana cost of the attached spell, as well as the one time action cost and mana cost of the wand, so it's the extra-action conjurations and mana sources that are the winning strategy that makes wand recursion possible.

The attrition style control you're describing works, but those wands aren't really helping most books win, they're just a victory condition after you've locked down your opponent.

Can you give a sample booklist, and gameplan for the first 5 turns or so?

Though now I'm kinda thinking of building a Harry Potter wizard with 4+4 wands and armour ward to see if I can overload my oponent's desolves.

[sIKE]

I have found that the best way to work against both Watergate and Wands is mana denial. That wand is useless if your opponent has very little mana. You get to force choices such as reveal that enchantment (curse on me) or cast that dispel. Jinx with no mana = dissolved wand. Wizard Tower with Attached spell with no mana = mana sink.

Typically this forces the opposing mage to become much more aggressive with this style of play and you have to be very aware of your board and NC control is very important in this style of play as if your NC has a WT in it, it is much more difficult to keep your mana draining conjuration up and running. I suggest a bunch of pushes and teleports to take advantage of your opponent paying to move to kill your conjurations and teleport traps are quite wicked here also.

[jacksmack]

ACG and RingKichard nailed it.

Somebody give them a banana sticker.

[Aylin]

1) Resurection - Yes, on several occasions I've traded creatures with my opponent until we were both nearly out  of creatures.   Then I started resurrecting mine....and he ran out.....game over.

That's more of an issue with your opponent not playing correctly than with Ressurection on a Wand, which is in general pretty weak.

2) I played a match today where and opponent cast 3-4 creatures, and charged me with his creatures and Mage.   I used my creatures and Mage to defeat his creatures, and he attacked my mage, knocking me down to less than 10% health by the time I eliminated his wand (which had his only Dissolve), and his creatures.  I then cast heal on my self every turn as my creatures turned on him.  I was able to heal myself back to near full health, and he gave up.  He didn't have the resources to deal with what I had on the map.

If your opponent has only a single Dissolve in her/his entire book, then your opponent ****** up before the game began. Dissolve is too useful to risk losing your only copy on a wand. Three is the absolute minimum number of destroy-equipment spells.

3) "All you need is Cheetah speed", did you miss the part where I have "Steal Enchantment"?   Your Cheetah speed becomes my creature's Cheetah speed.  (as many enchantments as you cast, I can steal.)   I've noticed after you steal 2-3, opponent's wise up and quit casting Enchantments. (to avoid me stealing them)

I didn't miss anything. You must have missed the fact that you can only have one Wand out at a time, and changing the spell takes a quick action. You can either have the Teleport or the Steal Enchantment on it, but not both. There's no way you could cast both from a wand in a single turn. If you take the time to switch, you're not Teleporting, so they can catch you anyway.

4) have Disenchant in my book if I just want to get rid of an enchantment rather than bounce it back.  Plus if my opponent isn't trying to destroy my wand, guess what else Nullify works on?

Getting through Nullify is trivially easy and cheap to do. It's one of the reasons many players no longer run any at all. If your opponent is expecting one, it doesn't really act as a defense. Also, Disenchant is not a spell currently in the game. I assume you mean Dispel.

5) Nullify and Armor ward - Yes I know.  I have both in my deck, I'm quite practiced at winning the Wand War.  The whole point of this post is, that the one who wins the wand war, is then in a situation with a huge upper hand because of the effectiveness of wands.

This is only if the game runs a long time.

7) Again, you're talking about how to play "Wand Wars".   I assure you I am a very experienced veteran of "wand wars", there are lots of tricks to keep your wands safe and deal with your opponent's wands.   I'm not arguing about the best way to win "Wand Wars", what I'm saying is, "He who wins the Wand War, has a Major upper hand in the game".   If you blow up my wands, and still have your own, YOU have the upper hand.  That's my point ... whomever wins the wand war gains a huge advantage.     And about winning the wand war...it sounds like you guys don't think wands are that effective, does that mean you jammed your own spell book full of Dissolves, and Decoys, and whatever other suggestions you had for defeating a wand deck?   I assure you I put a solid amount of Wand Defense, and Wand destruction, in my deck.  (I can cast my ONE Dissolve an unlimited number of times), so you will run out of nullifies, and eventually you'll run out of all your equipment, when I dissolve all that too, while keeping my own.   That is why the Winner of the Wand War, has the huge upper hand.

Honestly from your posts it sounds like your opponents are making mistakes when they build their spellbooks. If you're able to reuse a single copy of Dispel, Dissolve or Teleport with a Mage Wand, that tells me that your opponent's books aren't able to combat equipment in general, like that game you mentioned earlier where your opponent had only a single Dissolve.

If your book has only a single copy of those staple spells, you're at a disadvantage. You can't cast one of them if it's not on your wand if you know you'll need it in a later turn. Switching spells takes a whole action making it harder for you to adapt to your opponent. And what happens if you lose your wand with that spell on it?

@jacksmack

Thanks for the correction. I should have known it was Transfusion shenanigans.

[Brazil]

Wands can be powerful, but they're only worth it if you're playing for the long game and can expect to get there. But you're vastly overestimating them. Against a skilled opponent your wand won't last for more than 2 turns.

I assure you I protect my wand, if you don't commit serious resources to destroying it, you won't.   If you do commit serious resources to destroying it, then you have in fact bought in to the concept that "Winning the Wand war is crucial".  You will not destroy my wand with a couple disolves and seeking dispells.

[Aylin]

Wands can be powerful, but they're only worth it if you're playing for the long game and can expect to get there. But you're vastly overestimating them. Against a skilled opponent your wand won't last for more than 2 turns.

I assure you I protect my wand, if you don't commit serious resources to destroying it, you won't.   If you do commit serious resources to destroying it, then you have in fact bought in to the concept that "Winning the Wand war is crucial".  You will not destroy my wand with a couple disolves and seeking dispells.

I'm not arguing that if you play for a long game keeping your wands safe while destroying your opponents is a good strategy.

I'm arguing that wands aren't that powerful overall, and that you should have more than one copy of Dispel, Dissolve, and Teleport.

[webcatcher]

@ Brazil

The next time you play a game, take careful notes and post a detailed game report for us. You're obviously playing in a different local meta than most of us and I'd be fascinated to see how one of your games plays out. My local meta is very aggressive (as I think many are) and I think if I ever took the time to protect a wand that thoroughly I'd be dead before I had my wand defense set up.

[jacksmack]

You will not destroy my wand with a couple disolves and seeking dispells.

I estimate that i have tried to dissolve wands around 20 times.
I have failed doing so a total of one time. (due to an unexpected armor ward.)

Spending your Action Marker to nullify the enemy and then your Quickcast to Dissolve (having 9 mana) results in a destroyed wand almost always.

Divine intervention - so be it. The priestess needs to get positional advantage as well in order for this to be worth it. The nulify stays and isnt wasted so its 12 mana vs 5 mana. (unless she choose to reveal during nullify cast, but then she spends 12 mana vs 2 mana.)

Transfusion+nullify combo. In order for this to work you need to have a hidding enchantment on your mage as well otherwise i just seeking dispell your creature with 2 face down enchantments and then dissolve ur mage.
If you do this you spend 3 actions + an action casting mage wand and then i simply find other stuff to do taking advantage of you setting up an extreme overkill of Wand Destruction Emergency Plan.