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Upgrading your wands is a mandatory part of progression forMind Over Magic, but comes with increased statuses to manage. Failing to meet these advanced needs will make you prone to mental breaks and accumulating traumas that force you to retire your mages early.
The power they offer makes up for these costs. The stronger wands raise your level cap, allowing you to access new spells and perform tasks faster. Some rituals have stat requirements that make them functionally impossible without first upgrading your wands. This list will go through the different wands, their relative benefits and costs along with the best order to unlock them in.
How Wands Work
You’ll start the game with only access to the level one wands. These have no requirements or restrictions but are rather limited in the growth they’re able to offer. You can expect most students to not grow beyond level three in their primary skill.
The level one wands are never useless. You’ll need a steady supply to take in new students and any students with a poor matchup of traits, trials and quirks isbest kept at level one and graduated quickly.
The level two and three wands grant extra power and potential:
This comes with a pair of downsides:
The conviction needs are the main source of complexity in how the wands compare to each other. Failing to manage their status can give up to30 points of conviction loss, driving pretty much any character to the point of breaking.
Wands Tier List
The tiers the wands fall into are largely dependent onhow easy they are to manage this conviction requirement, followed by their utility in both basebuilding and combat.
A-Tier Wands
All three of the conviction requirements in this tier should be self-fulfilling, especially if you use windows for natural lighting as that satisfies both nature and darkness wands.
Base Use
Earth
Earth mages must spend time on or below the ground floor of your buildings.
Earth mages are thestrongest tanks in the game, especially once they gain their ultimate spell.
Construction speedis always useful, as your school should always be expanding.
Nature
Nature mages want to be exposed to sunlight frequently.
Nature magic gives a strong mix of percentage damage, healing and forced movement.
You’ll always need more farmers and this alsoensures they meet their sunlight needs.
Dark
Dark mages desire moonlight exposure (this can befulfilled while they’re sleeping).
Dark mages hit like a truck butspend HP to cast, forcing them to take downtime without combat healing.
Quilting allows you toautomate simple tasks, letting dark mages cover the work of water, earth, nature and air mages.
These three schools of magicalso have the strongest applications in the early game. This helps your school get established fast and gather the materials needed for the more fussy wand types.
B-Tier Wands
The B tier of wands has morenarrow requirements that impede how quickly you’re able to introduce them. Handing them out to all your starting staff to make chores go faster won’t pose an issue but you should be careful about giving them to students.
Air
Air mages get upset if they aren’t able to move vertically, by climbing stairs or ladders.
Strong damage and powerful buffsbut runs out of mana quickly.
Air is used to assemble furniture, which only becomes relevant when you need to furnish more elaborate chambers.
Lightning
Lightning mages become introverted and are unhappy to share rooms and workspaces with others.
Lightning is one of the few reliable ways ofhitting enemies in the back row.
Lightning is needed for research.You’ll want one very good lightning magerather than several mediocre ones.
Water
Water wands create extroverts who need to be in groups to stay happy. Communal dorms and eating spaces will satisfy them.
Water does a bit of everything butdoesn’t specialise as hard as other schools.
You’ll need water mages to cleanunless a dark mage is able to quilt cleaning constructs.
Water magic is also needed for potion crafting, which becomes relevant in the mid to late game.
C-Tier Wands
There’s only one wand in the bottom tier and it’s enough of a liability thatyou might avoid giving any out at all.
Base use
Fire
Fire wands create a thirst for combat, needing to either hunt or fight at regular intervals.
Fire offers pure damage withno tools for defence or healing.
Fire is needed for cooking, butgiving your cook a fire wand will turn them stir-crazy.
Fire wandsare especially hazardous to give to students who aren’t able to do hunting work. This means your weak, fragile students are only able to maintain their sanity if thrown into combat. Fire magic offers no tools for mitigating damage or restoring health, so you’ll typically need to babysit them with apprentices or staff.
Allowing the wards in your underschool to fail on purposeis a good way to get low-level encounters for your fire mages.
you may avoid having to micromanage a fire wand by instead training a dual-class student who starts with a different wand. They’ll gain a modest boost to fire magic but can use the conviction bonuses of another wand.
