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Just bought mage wars the other day and my friend and I are insanely into it. My personal highlights so far after a half-dozen or so games -

*I love the spellbook feature. Being able to pick and choose your spells before a battle adds a whole new element to the game as you have to balance equipment, creatures, incantations, enchantments, conjurations and attack spells. Almost everything you pick will be a part of a greater tactic - using walls to block enemies' spells, using the right enchantments and incantations at the right time, making sure the units you pick synergise with each other. It's a great feeling when you think you've got the perfect formula for a powerful list, and flicking through it in an actual spell book adds a huge element of cool to the whole procedure. You really do feel like a mage with a spellbook that's brimming with power and possibilies.

*The way that the game is structured fits brilliantly with the spell effects, especially the Quick Cast mechanic. It's a great way of making every single turn seem like a new challenge, and when you use it to pull off a brilliant combination you do feel like you've actually used your brain to win, which is satisfying.

*The artwork and production values are A*. Everything in this game looks and feels gorgeous, it feels like a real treat to just set the game up.

I also had some flaws with it. Namely balance - The Wizard seems absurdly OP. Summoning the Gate of Volshoi (or whatever) turn 1 guarentees you an extra 3 mana per turn pretty much indefinitely. He also has dirt-cheap arcane spells which means he can dominate the buff/nerf game, and he has powerful ranged units that grant serious debuffs when they hit. When I played against the warlord as him he dominated completely, and when we switched roles and I played as the warlock it felt like an uphill struggle. I only won because my opponent was new to the list and he made a couple of mistakes and the wrong time, it still felt like I spent most of that game just being pounded on by the much more powerful army.

If I had some other critisisms I'd say that there aren't enough of the sort of cards that a lot of people would want, namely dispel and seeking dispel, I'd also like to see way more elemental attack spells. There are four elemental schools of magic, yet only two of them has any attack spells. Also the points costs of a lot of things need tweaking, and there needs to be a greater variety of equipment.

I played it last year with some friends at Gencon. It was kind of cool, but didn't strike me as something we'd get into. We found some big time balance issues then as well, though it might have been based upon not all of us grasping the rules at the same rate.

I like Mage Wars - it seems to be a pretty deep and well-designed game - but I found it simply takes far too long to play. It's not a good choice for people who suffer analysis paralysis.