I suspect Hand was intended to be versatile utility, and a temple, so it would power up other temples. Like Garrison Post in the Warlord book, it's supposed to be comparable in cost to Mana Flower and Mana Crystal, and power up the spawn point while doing some work on the side. It's not supposed to be the "Well, now I'm a 9 die melee god" card it became. No single card is ever supposed to do that.
Mage Wars is very careful to limit mono-culture and stacking, so when we found a stackable mono-culture... that was a good sign that something probably went wrong.
Here were the warning signs for Hand of Bim-Shalla:
Level 1, so 6 are legal per book, but only 1 in the base set, and only 1 each in the spell tomes.
Stackable bonus that doesn't require being attached to anything. Attachment is the throttle for stackable.
Ranged effect with no minimum or maximum range.
Free quasi-action for uninterpretable combos.
So a lot of people probably stuck them into their tournament builds: congratulations, you beat the game, or at least you learned what beats the game online. But they can't let the game stay beaten, right?
You want to go at it again? How-about best two out of three? Try to break some other card. Here're some avenues for exploration:
Hand of Bim-Shalla isn't the only melee bonus that'll stack.
There are other Conjurations that can act without passing priority to your opponent.
Enchantments are even faster than ready-marker Conjurations, actually.
No one has broken a Novice spell yet, but Novice is code for, "When this is broken, every book will use it."
It's a vast and fertile territory: a target rich environment. If you don't get to it, someone else will first!
