Let the Archmage have the dragons...
It will be a fantastic gaming experience to take a team of mages and defeat the Archmage with her dragons.
I would love to see Dragons as Mages. Perhaps as a standalone but fully compatible companion game with slightly different mechanics. For example, Mage Wars is to <new dragon game> as Warmachine is to Hordes. Each game has a group of principals who share a common set of mechanics, and the games can be freely combined.
I think it would be cool if there were some high stat creatures that someone could play as instead of a mage, which would fight using its powerful abilities instead of spell casting. For instance, a Giant would have innate mage bind, would always occupy two zones simultaneously, and would have a powerful melee attack.
The kind of dragon for this mode of play could probably have vampiress like flying ability (since it's big and heavy so can only fly for short stretches of time), a ranged breath attack, the ability to recover by resting, and perhaps the ability to lay eggs and guard them.
Perhaps you could also play as faerie princes or faerie princesses, powerful beings of pure magic who die when they have no mana in their mana pool and can cast any spell in the game that isn't school or mage class only provided that they have the mana to pay for it.
I also have thought of non magical arena fighters called Ingenieers; instead of casting spells from a spellbook, they combine items from their toolbox to make new objects and effects. For instance, you could build robots from mechanical parts, a variety of concoctions from chemical components, and you could breed new creatures to fight for you.
http://forum.arcanewonders.com/index.php?topic=13820
