I agree mostly with you Nate, but I do kind of like the d6 mast dice to cast after declaring the spell as a way to move away from 6 dicing bullcrap. I think that there's probably a better way to move people away from the 6 dice shenanigans, but while this may not be best I think it will be effective to discourage those big spells. Still though, overall these magic rules are pretty terri-bad.