I just had a nice long conversation with sharkbait today in which he explained a very interesting idea about why people haven't been playing the wizard as intended.
1. Wizard pays x1 for most mana and channeling modifiers. Anything that increases his mana or decreases his opponent's mana he is probably able to access more easily.
2. That gives him a built-in mana advantage over other mages. Why does he have this built-in mana advantage? Why would he even need it?
3. Why? To pay for voltaric shield. But usually the Wizard doesn't use the shield at all until very late in the game. Most of the game he never uses it. This allows him to build up an extra mana advantage that would otherwise be used on the shield. And more mana also means he can cast more creatures, spawnpoints and familiars, and that means more actions. So why doesn't he need to use the voltaric shield very much at all?
4. Because he has too much armor. But there are counters to armor! Isn't using acid ball on him, or rust, or piercing damage enough to deal with that?
5. No it's not. Why not? Because of his action and mana advantage. He can just cast more, and he's not worried about the mana and quick action needed to do that. But he wouldn't have that action and mana advantage if he used the shield more, and he would use the shield more if he had less armor, right?
6. Wrong. It's not a matter of how much armor the Wizard has alone. It's a matter of how much more armor he has on than you do. The Wizard can get rid of your armor too, with dispels and dissolves and acid balls, etc. But then what's the difference between wizards and other mages here? Everyone can use acid balls and dissolves and dispels! And acid balls and dispels are not even arcane spells! What gives the wizard his special advantage even when he's not trained in water?
7. There is a limit to the number of copies of a particular spell that you can include in your spellbook. 6 copies max for lv1 spells, 4 copies max for everything else. During a game, this usually means that a Mage can cast at most 6 dispels and 6 dissolves and 6 acid balls. But there are exceptions to this. Four of them, in fact: any spell that's bound to an elemental wand, mage wand, wizard tower or thoughtspore, can be cast more times than the maximum number of copies of that spell which can be included in your spellbook. Out of these four cards, the wizard pays x1 spellbook points for three of them, one of which he has exclusive access to. But then why does thoughtspore not cause the same problems in the forcemaster that the tower and wands cause in the wizard?
8. Probably because the tower and wands are undercosted and the spores are not. Thoughtspore is level 2, costs 8 mana and a full action. The spore is easy to kill and expensive to replace. Protecting the spores costs additional mana and quick actions. Mage Wands and Elemental Wands only cost 5 mana and a quick action each, and can be replaced so easily that you don't need to invest very much if anything in protecting them. With a battle forge they can keep replacing each other for as long as the Forge is in play. In fact, the wands have an ability to switch their bound spell for a quick action and 3 mana. No one uses this ability because it's so much more efficient to just deploy another wand from the forge.
The Wizard Tower costs 7 mana, has 1 channeling, and can change its bound spell for free. It only costs 2 more mana than a wand. By itself, Wizard Tower isn't very hard to destroy. It only has 3 armor and 7 life, so it has the same armor and less life than an emerald tegu. However, it is so crazy efficient that you generally don't need to protect it at all. If the first one dies you just summon another one, and there's no need to do things like guarding it with a gargoyle sentry or something.
But couldn't you just destroy their wands and tower? Why wouldn't that be enough?
9. There are limited number of crumbles and dissolves in your deck, and if you use them to destroy the opponent's wands and tower, they'll just bring out more wands. If you ignore their wands and just acid ball them, they'll just bring out more armor. Therefore you need to destroy all of their wands and tower, and if you do not or cannot have enough copies of dissolve, crumble or corrodisve orchid in your spellbook to get rid of all their wands, then you will need wands of your own. In other words the only answer to spellbind is spellbind. This doesn't seem to be a problem for the thoughtspore of course, because the thoughtspore costs a full action and therefore isn't so easy to replace.
-Wizard Tower costs 7 mana and a quick action. Maybe it should cost 2 more mana, and be one level higher?
-The wands each cost 5 mana and a quick action. Maybe they should cost 1 more mana and be one level higher?
So ultimately the reason people have been playing the wizard like a brute force Mage rather than a trickster and master manipulator, the reason they've been able to run the brute force wizard at all, is probably because he spams objects with spellbind and pays x1 spellbook points for them.
EDIT: accidentally posted this before I was done.
