Spells that weren't just direct-damage types would be awesome.  Spells that change the environment, like flooding or lowering/raising/otherwise affecting land would be fun and pretty effective in various situations.  Illusion and conjuring magic would also be great.

I would like to challenge Stardock to not include a spell named Fireball, actually.  It could be a way to really advertise the spell diversity

No offense taken, mein freund (or meine freunde, depending). 

I hope to see lots of spell that can manipulate the world and the environment in sucha  fshion that we can elude the opponent and trick them. Instead of direct combat. I wish I could see a spell of mass illusions. exemple, a vast army marching. Your opponant then sends it's own to intercept and when they finally get there and start combat they see that their weapons and or magic as no effect and then realise that they are facing illusions. During that time I sent another army and I am not attacking an unprotected town.

Something like that would be really cool.

I'd like to see something like this also, especially if it also can be connected to quests. And now that this forum has been active for more than a season, I'm really, really wondering just how locked down the magic system plans are.

The longer the devs make us wait for some basic parameters, the more time we'll have to become too fond of ideas that just won't work with Elemental. I was really hoping for at least a couple of months where the pre-order crowd could discuss magic like we've been able to do for the unit creation and re-thought 4X economy stuff. But then I've not done an early Stardock beta before, so maybe I'm worrying too much about how little things might change after we get our fingers on those first semi-public builds.

Well, I'm 99.9% sure the spells are going to be moddable, so eventually there will be thousands of them floating around on the web. The only question in my mind is, will modders just be able to change the numbers around a bit, or will the special features be available for change as well. One of my biggest problems with GC2 is that the module and tech bonuses are attached to the internal names or a special on-off tag, as opposed to being truly moddable.

Personally, I like a bit of a blended model:

1. Start with a large libray of effects
2. Add a large library of and prequisites to those effects ("prequisite" isn't a great term here - maybe "side effect" is better, or even "means").
   
3. Create base library of spells that use these effects and prequisites
4. Let modders add spells as well, using these effects and prequisite

In Dom3, there's a cool spell that sends a flock of ravens to a battlefield, destroys corpses, and recovers Death Gems (a resource).  In the model above, the "prequisite" is the flock of ravens; there are two effects: corpse destruction, and death gem creation.

Getting a list of #1 is fairly straightforward, getting a list of #2 is where imagination (and probably more coding) come into play.  Dom3 does a great job coming up with ideas for #2, though of course the nature of the game engine is such that they don't have to display every effect: they just describe them.