I hate when there are a ton of unusable spells too.  Heck we could extend this to units or anything else.  If things are unusable, then that is a sure sign of weak balancing by the developers.  A factor I see a lot of developers miss when balancing units is  flexibility vrs. specialization.  Spells that are global in nature, useful more frequently and in more situations are more desireable.  For example, damage spells should always cost more to use, because they are way more flexible(ie. easy to get into a situation where you can use it). I HATE it when I'm forced to use a certain spell because I'm at a disadvantage if I don't.  One way to gage spell value would be to have usage statistics.  Its pretty obvious that a spell is useless if it is hardly ever used.    I don't mind so much if a spell is useful for a certain level range.  In that case, the players just have to make a decison whether to spend their precious resources to use it for the little time it has value.

So, my preference is that there is number of spells included that can be balanced properly.  That number can always be increased with expansions.

Yeah that's great and all.. but what you're arguing for here is a lack of BROKEN spells and nothing to do with their number! No one here is endosing buggy spells, that would be insane, we can only make recommendations for the game assuming that SD will implement them properly. All the concepts for the spells above would be interesting and fun within the context of the game assuming they did what they were supposed to do (more spells in this case would equal more fun).

What I said was that I couldn't imagine more spells decreasing my enjoyment of the game, and I fail to see how superflouus spells would do that. If a spell is, for whatever reason, totally obsolete then I just don't use it and get on with the game, this doesn't decrease my enjoyment of the game one bit apart from having to navigate a slightly longer list of spells.. and, assuming that the game has a good user interface (including filtering and searching facilities) this wouldn't even be a problem even the extreme case of there being thousands of superflous spells in the game. Now obviously I'm not advocating that.. but from my personal standpoint it wouldn't cause me to have less fun.

Actually I quite liked Cracks Call, it maybe needed a simpler counter than just making all your best units able to fly (maybe having the cost of the spell go up with the quality of the unit you were using it against) but in general I thought a probability based direct damage spell was an interesting way of adding some variety to that part of the game.