[Valerius]

When I was working on making some changes for an experimental game it occurred to me that iron bane is surprisingly cheap to cast. Compare to other battlefield-wide E spells:

Earthquake - 3 gems
Rain of Stones - 2 gems
Curse of Stones - 3 gems
Army of Gold - 3 gems
Army of Lead - 3 gems

Of course iron bane, unlike destruction, still requires a hit in order to destroy the armor but destruction has a much smaller AOE and requires proper scripting/placement.

In the experimental game I ended up increasing the gem cost and making it MRN easily, like curse of stones. I'm not proposing that but given that it is battlefield-wide and there's no resistance roll it seems reasonable that it should cost more than 1 E gem to cast. How about 2 gems? Though even at 3 gems it would still be perfectly usable by an E1 mage with earth boots and summon earthpower (since unlike the spells listed above, especially the offensive ones, there's no need for iron bane to be cast the first round to get the full benefit from it).