'Master of Magic'?

Oh my stars and garters. Master of Magic is the 'spiritual predecessor' of Elemental, and if corporate IP/marketing crapola hadn't ensued, the game might even have officially been Master of Magic 2. 

Gotta love just how flexible the scraps we have so far are when one of us applies our own imagination. One of my background-thoughts for the OP was that I kind of hope to see essence limited to imbuing stuff and that we'll neither use essence for world-wrecking nor see it spent on things like one-time map reveals or granary fillups. Your line about medieval medicine makes some sense to me, but the 5-elements thing has always made me think first of Chinese and Japanese elemental mythology. 'Life' in Elemental is some sort of Wood Void...

I wasn't trying to argue, just typing about how interesting it is to me that we can have such very different responses to the same basic set of limited information. It's not like the devs have given us anything substantive to disagree on yet.

Maybe it could be a victory condition, amass enough of all types of mana + a significant amount of essence and create the some sort of "Tower of Elements"

I'm not entirely sure I'd want this. It sounds like some penultimate god-spell that requires everything of everything. I'd much prefer there to be a diverse amount of very strong spells that are perhaps the combination of two, three elements at maximum.

No single channeler should ever be the ultimate mage of all the elements at once. You should always have to make a choice as to what you're going to have access to. Do I want fire or earth? Do I want air or water? Where do I specialize? Not just "I'll take it all".

In the classical interpretations of the elements, the fifth element is usually "aether", "space", or "void" - depending on who you ask. But none of them appear to be a combination of the other four elements.

At the moment, I guess I'm inclined to believe that we won't have element specialization that's analagous to the spell-book specialization in MoM. Your elemental 'alignment,' if it exists at all, will be based on the type(s) of shard(s) that you control. On a large map, controlling 5 shards doesn't seem at all unreasonable, and controlling 5 different types of shard seems at least plausible (perhaps a possibility that can be influenced by map settings).

Picking Call the Void as an example was not so much about wanting a "penultimate god-spell" as looking for an idea that fit and would be familiar to plenty of folks around here. It just seems sorta reasonable that if 5-element spells exist, they should be at least big juju, unless it somehow ends up common for a channeler to have at least 1 shard of all 5 types. Time Stop could be really fun, especially for those "oh, they're gonna kill us" moments that leave you having to guess whether its smart to run away or whether you should get enough forces together to turn the tables solidly when the Time Stop ends.

P.S. Y'all have got me half-remembering yet another brief time with a tabletop RPG--wasn't there some ancient Asian setting where Metal was an element?

Persistent, yes, but not rude, at least as far as I'm concerned.

From the Lore page: "In the final stages of the war, the powers gathered up nearly all the magic of the world and concentrated them into a series of crystals that represented the basic elements of magic: Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Life."

I know that content's well over 6 months old, but I haven't seen the slightest hint from the devs that Life is not an element in its own right.

Well, there are only four elemental crystal pictures. Since the four were released, why would they withold a fifth?

See, it's centrally located, while the other four are around the sides. It is also part of the title, and it appears in boogiebac's runic texts as a hyroglyph(sp?) for the word "magic". That is what makes me think it is the sum of all the others.

The elemental crystals/badges that have been shown are simply icons amongst others. Obviously, not all of them have been released or are even finished. But there are five elements (arguably possibly 6, if you consider death a seperate aspect of the life element).

Edit: Bah. Darkinoidiplus and Scoutdawg sorted it out between themselves while I was posting. Yet, I have an addenum:

Really I want anything that uses several spell types.  I'd be leary of one that uses all 5 because I'd expect it to either A: require low levels in all 5, or almost impossible to cast (because getting near max in all 5 elements I think should be near impossible)

I still think that channeler magic ability should be totally shapable within the game, and not predetermined at game creation like in AoW:SM. For example, if circumstances permit, a player should be able to choose whether to focus and excel in one or two schools of magic, or to spread himself out and become a jack of all schools, master of none. And eventually, if one channeler who chose to become a jack of all schools, became powerful enough, he should be able to master all the schools. Even still, another ~equal channeler could've focused on one or two schools and would be considered more of a grandmaster of those two schools. In other words, hard limits should be avoided in favor of soft limits. 

That said, I'd love to see spells use all 5 elements, and all other combinations, too. Multi-school magic would also make cooperative magic between channelers much more interesting (that is, if we get cooperative magic)!

I kind of agree with this. I don't think you should have to limit yourself to just one or two, but if you have all 4/5, you will be weak in all of them, where as if you choose 1 or 2 you are significantly stronger in those 1 or 2. So you can either be diverse with weak spells for all the elements, or have strong spells in just 1 or 2.