Abracadabra. Co0kieL0rd and i tested some Spells today. Amazingly, they worked kind of well for the most part. We decided to stick with 3 Spells per game, and did two games. We played with the Spells lying in the kingdom, similar to Events, and each player owning 5 tokens in the respective player colours. When you buy a Spell, put your token there, when you cast one, remove the token. It worked.
The first kingdom had Trickster and Wizards, with the Spells being Wisdom, Purity and Power (new).
A noticeable problem on this board was a
lack of +Buy, which we feared would render Spells rather useless. Given Wizard's Spell-preparation-skills ("prepare" means "place a token", btw), it kind of worked out. Wizard casting one or two Power Spells was a sure way to spike very high very early. Sadly, i decided to green much too early (curse you Wizards!), and then even trashed my Wizards for Provinces. Later i tried to use my stalling turns to get some magic for my few Tricksters, but it was too late and i lost
We played the game with a version of Wizard that only works on-buy, but i found out that the combo i tried to avoid when making it on-buy doesn't work either way, so i decided to revert that change afterwards. Power's special ability and Wizard's double-cast were kind of redundant. With more +Buy, who knows how good casting Power could have been.
Wisdom Spells and Trickster were nice. Purity works, but the mega-turn where you would use it to its greatest effect didn't happen here. Either way, not the total disaster i feared.
The second game had these:
A notable thing about this game was the existance of
Port. Man, it's really easy to play a few Magicians and get incredibly much money for a Wealth Spell once you invested in a few Ports. I won this one by a single point, using Glory to avoid stalling too early. It was a close one. Interestingly, Sorcerer didn't get used much simply because we were too eager to try ourself at Magician's crazy tricks, and another cantrip in the kingdom (my Artisan, which picks up
-cost cards) was better to help with that. Either way, i feel Glory might be too cheap, but then i had the slight feeling most Spells might be. Magician definitely is the combo card here.