Action Economy

Action Economy is a concept that judges a creature based on how much a creature can accomplish within a single turn. This concept is present in many strategy games, but is particularly important in Mind Over Magic.
== Staff and Students ==
Students and Staff have access to several actions they can take each turn, including standard actions such as casting a spell, and a bonus action such as drinking a potion. These actions each carry value, and are essentially a measure of your ability to impact the battle at hand. In general, the more actions you are able to take, the more impact you will have on the result of a battle. This makes choosing the number of staff and students you bring into a battle very important, as the opponent being able to take more actions than you puts you at a serious disadvantage. Less actions mean less overall damage per turn, healing per turn, or effects given or removed per turn, and and this effect compounds the greater the difference between sides in a battle. In general, Staff and Students always want to have the same number or more combatants than the opponent. 
== Enemy ==
Enemies generally only take one action per turn, which can be viewed by hovering over the enemy during combat. This action may have multiple effects, or may be targeting multiple friendly characters. Generally it is best practice to focus on eliminating those enemies who have the largest reach or most damaging abilities first to reduce the difficulty of the fight as it progresses. This means that the number of actions per turn on the enemy side is usually defined by the number of enemy combatants, and can be reduced by eliminating foes from the turn order.
== Balancing the Economy ==
When battling, the number of actions available per side has a significantly greater impact on the outcome of the battle than the individual strength of those actions. Becoming outnumbered in actions can be a death sentence, or can be utilized to turn a difficult battle to your advantage. More actions available means more ability to deal or remove damage, and less enemy combatants is a smaller number of incoming attacks that need to be dealt with. Actions that attack multiple targets, or actions that effect an entire row, can also be viewed as more dangerous or impactful to the state of a battle. This means that a 1 difficulty battle with 4 enemies in it could be just as hard as a 2 difficulty battle with only a single one, as the enemy gets a much larger number of chances to deal damage to you, and you have to split your damage over more points. This is one reason some players may find the Burrower Larva fight to be an effective way to complete trials, as while the boss hits hard, it is only a single creature taking one action per turn which can be avoided.
To balance this economy, focus on increasing the amount of actions you are taking versus the amount of actions the opponent is taking. One direct example of this is the Haste spell, which allows one of your characters to take an additional action at the beginning of a turn. Another would be the Jolted or Soaked effect, which can reduce an enemies' speed and force them to take their action at the end of the turn. The most effective way to increase your position in the economy is to target and eliminate enemies, removing them before they have the ability to take their turn.