Part 4: Beams and Solids: Why antimatter matters
Magical Theory: Beams and Solids
So, if you remember the priority Shields are at the very beginning and Fluids are very end. In between it goes Solids, then Beams. Beams are a lot simpler so I'll go over them first.
Beams
Arcane and Life function pretty much the same in that they are complete opposites. Life will restore HP to living creatures and damage Undead, while Arcane will damage living creatures and heal Undead. Also, Arcane deals a little bit of knockback when combined with Shield for mines, but that's about it. Really simple. To get the actual beam effect, you just do a standard right-click Aimed cast. The more Life/Arcanes you have in the spell, longer it will last but it won't do any more damage.
Beams also have a ton of hidden mechanics in them. But, I can't really get example pictures for these on my own, but as you saw in the LP, if you cross streams, they will combine with each other and point in a new direction in between the two. This can make aiming with your combined streams a little difficult. However, the greatest danger is if these combined streams contain opposing, it'll create a nice damaging explosion at the point of combination. All Life and Arcanes in the explosion will convert to straight damage so you can't get healed whether you're living or undead or vampire.
Also, beams can also reflect off Shields and a few other shiny surfaces. If you shoot right at it, you'll reflect it back at yourself and the explosion will happen right in your face. Now, why does that work?
Because crossing your own stream (as seen in my crudely drawn circle) causes an explosion because of some kind of magical paradox I don't know.
I think the game checks for a the explosion after making sure the beam goes as far as it can which can take a few frames since it doesn't move at the speed of light. 
Goddammit Navi SHUT UP!
Self-casting Heal and Arcane is rediculously simple and unimportant, and using Healing and Arcane so I'll move on to Area-casting Heal and Arcane. The Nova. I know this I totally stole from the Magicka wiki but it sounds so cool I just kept using it. They don't deal a whole lot of damage, and have pretty short range but will hit everything around you without hurting yourself. The more Life/Arcanes you add to the Nova, the larger the range but again it won't improve damage.
Weapon-casting these two...
It's not that great. The range is lower than a Nova, and the damage is really poor. More Life/Arcanes increase the range as per usual but...meh. I don't like this.Beams + Fluids
So...on their own, Beams are nice but not great. They are reliable to use and can easily hit anything, but have difficulty dealing damage. How do we get around that? Fluids. Adding a fluid to a Beam spell adds the damage of the fluid and any status effects they would inflict. In fact the best way to get damage out of a Beam spell is to just put one Arcane and as many Fluids as you can fit to create a murderbeam. This applies to Novas as well, although a single Arcane usually isn't enough range to hit anything. For that I find usually two or three Arcanes is enough to get some nice damage in.
I would heavily recommend against using this with Life to heal your allies or damage undead. Most undead enemies take a lot of damage from Life on it's own, and you can just spam Life mines for tons of damage with no knockback.
Solids
These two follow relatively similar mechanics yet are really different in effect. First things first though. Earth opposes Lightning and doesn't combine at all. Ice is formed by combining Water and Cold, and melts to Water by combining it with Fire.
When Aimed, both deal physical damage (although for some reason Ice seems to do extra damage against fire enemies, such as the Salamanders) and can be charged for extra range and damage, but behave totally differently. Earth creates a powerful rock that smashes things up. Ice creates tons of ice shards and can rip a small cluster of enemies to shreds...or at least it used to after they heavily nerved Ice for the PvP patch.
Also, I'd like to point out that while you CAN charge them, sometimes you should consider not doing so because casting the spells this way has a very short recoil animation, so you can spam these spells if you are really quick with both hands.
Area-casting is where the differences start to show. Earth just deals no damage but knocks down all enemies nearby. Ice creates ice spikes that rise from the ground and...actually deal some pretty nice damage but will probably kill nearby allies since it's Physical based. Both increase range based on how many Earths and Ice you have, and Ice will deal more damage with more Ice as well making it rather effective.
...meh. You hit yourself for physical damage. Why?
As for weapon-casting, both do a vertical slice, but again it's not really that great. There are far better ways to deal damage, not to mention Earth just does more knockdown and no damage on it's own. Of course, adding other elements keeps the vertical slice but then you get other effects in to so it's up to you but really I don't think this style is very useful.
Solids + Beams/Fluids
First I'll cover Area casting. Pretty simple, you attack with the other elements while knocking them down or striking them with erupting ground ice. Good for combining with Earth but I haven't tested much when combining with Ice because...well...Mono-Ice is actually pretty good on it's own here.
Now when you are Aiming (and Self-casting it too, but except for one time in the LP that's never useful) a Solid + Beam/Fluid spell, Earth and Ice act completely differently.
For Earth, you get an elemental explosion when it lands, and the boulder will no longer bounce. Adding more Earth will increase the size of the boulder and do extra collision damage, and extra elements will create a larger explosion.
For Ice, the elements join the ice shards directly and deal extra damage plus status effects on each hit. More Ice gives you more ice shards and extra elements will deal more damage. Find the careful balance there if you plan on using these.
Krysmphoenix's Rotes
Standard Murderbeam
This is your standard murderbeam. Combine the synergy between Lightning and Steam with a little Arcane to focus it straight at your enemy and watch them explode. You'll have to be a little creative to find this on your own, and I honestly did not. Most players figure this out by being told or copying others who already use this shockingly deadly spell.
Standard Murdernova
But I think I'm more fond of the standard murdernova. It follows the same basic principles, except you need a bit more Arcane for some nice range, and this will just brutally kill a lot of things around you. The murderbeam is great for single enemies, this is great for swarms.
Slow Fall
This won't deal much damage, but it has a large range and will Chill your enemies. Because being chilled makes all of your animations take longer to play, it's really great and keeping an enemy in place and off your back for a few seconds. Plus they are still chilled after they get up.
Comet
Remember how deadly a Mono-Earth spell is when fully charged and with 5 elements? This expands on it. Earth + Ice spells when Aimed are weird in that they don't bounce and deal all their damage to one enemy. However, Ice in general deals more damage than earth so this is probably the strongest single target spell in the game. A great anti-boss spell if you can charge it up. Oh, and this enemy wasn't even frozen for x3 damage.
Rapidfire Explosions
Do not take this to five elements, leave it at three. All you have to do is type out SDF and then right-click somewhere, and do this as fast as you possibly can. Aimed solid attacks are really spammable, and combining it with Arcane and Fire is great for dealing area of effect damage to mid-ranged enemies.
So, that's it for these. If I had actually kept up and cranked these out faster, I would have gone a bit over the Magicks in the game but I think you saw us spam the good ones through the course of the LP. There are a couple of reasons I did these in the first place. One, to help players realize just how deep the game gets with it's magic system, and two, to bring to light this amazing carefully crafted system and intricacies that most players will never realize.
I'm STILL not fully sure how it works, but the developers for this game created something amazing. Sure, you can probably get by knowing a few amazing spells taught to you by someone else, but I still remember my first playthrough and how fun it was trying to figure out how to make things work just right. I didn't even know the standard murderbeam until my second playthrough, so I had to rely on all my other tricks through experimentation. And that's really all this is, my experiments in seeing how the elements react together. And once you know how the pieces work...
You'll become a master of magick.