"Mages wield the elements of fire, frost, and the arcane to destroy or neutralize their enemies. They are a robed class that excels at dealing massive damage from afar, casting elemental bolts at a single target, or raining destruction down upon their enemies in a wide area of effect. Mages can also augment their allies' spell-casting powers, summon food or drink to restore their friends, and even travel across the world in an instant by opening arcane portals to distant lands.
When seeking someone to introduce monsters to a world of pain, the mage is a good choice. With their elemental and arcane attacks, it's a safe bet something they can do won't be resisted by your chosen enemy. Damage is the name of the mage game, and they do it well. Their arsenal includes some powerful crowd control spells, also, giving them the ability to keep hordes at bay -- in fact, these abilities can be used on the most common creatures in the game, thus making them extremely valuable for this purpose."
A quick glance at the mage's abilities shows a huge amount of versatility. Everything from increasing your hand size to stopping the opposition from attacking to blasting the whole field with huge amounts of damage. Moreover, mages have one of the only two interrupts currently in the game, meaning they are able to stop things that most other classes simply have to swallow. That said, let's take a look at the arcane side of the mage's playbook and what you should expect when you see a mage across the table from you.
Arcane Intellect is a perfect example of the power behind a mage. While most heroes are limited to seven cards in their hand mages easily reach ten, thirteen, or even as many as nineteen cards in their hand. Needless to say, having more than twice as many cards as your opponent obviously allows you an similar expansion of options. Mana Agate isn't necessarily the best card drawing tool in the game, as some quests can give you a similar result for a lower cost. However, since you can only have four copies of the card-drawing quests in your deck, the ability to add another four cards to the card drawing engine is significant, and for a mage that uses Arcane Intellect, card drawing is vastly important.
While mages are obviously good at increasing their options, they're also notoriously low on health, making them very vulnerable to attack. While their card represenations only have one less health than the priests in the game, mages are actually very good at eluding combat.
Blink gives you an additional card boost and instantly prevents a combat from happening. While it won't save them from a large mass of attacking allies, it can prevent the final blow and give the mage a chance to recuperate and lash out with his (or her) own powers. Polymorph is also extremely useful in preventing combat as the ongoing ability turns even the fiercest ally into a harmless sheep. While it can be dispelled or burnt away, Polymorph is good for negating protectors or stopping a game-winning ally from performing.
Finally the mage's game changing card. While most players have to wait for an ability to enter play with its ongoing text, mages have the advantage of being able to stop any ability, ongoing or otherwise. This is a significant advantage when facing abilities that aren't ongoing, such as Vanquish or Face Smash. Even better, the only way a Counterspell will fail is if your opponent plays a Counterspell of their own or plays the warrior's Shield Bash, meaning that you can stop most opponents whenever you want.
That's it for the arcane mage abilities. Check back next time for a look at the mage's fiery temper.
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