Welcome to my second guide! I hope that it will prove useful to you! If you like it, please leave a comment.
My first guide was focused on early and mid-game, and basic builds for your mages. In this guide I want to focus more on late game and building epic mages, and to do that we need to look at relics, as they are the key to making overpowered mages. So, parts of this guide will hopefully be useful both to new and experienced players alike in any stage of the game.

Every time a mage is promoted to apprentice, graduates, is hired as staff or retires they manifest a relic. The maximum level of the relic does not depend on the mage level or skills. Rather it depends on how many trials they have successfully completed, the tier of their wand and have they been made into an apprentice.


Which means that the maximum possible level of manifested relics is lvl 24. There are level 25 relics in the game, but they must be obtained by fighting through the Infinite Halls in the Nexus at the bottom of the Underschool, or your existing relics can be upgraded to lvl 25 through dragon quests.
In practice this means that your Tier 1 wand mages with all three trials completed will manifest level 8 relics in early game to mid game. You will probably either hire these directly or graduate them.
Tier 2 wand mages with four trials completed will manifest level 14 relics when graduated or made into an apprentice, and level 17 when hired as mages or graduated after apprenticeship.

Tier 3 wand mages with all five trials completed will manifest level 21 relics when graduated or made into an apprentice, and level 24 when hired as mages or graduated after apprenticeship.
I will later explain which relic levels are the most useful and which ones you should keep and which should be pulverized into gnosis shards.

Mages can attune the relics of up to the same level as theirs. However, there are exceptions.
Building rooms Library and Atheneum allow mages to attune relics of +3 and +7 level compared to theirs respectively.
Building Archive and displaying faction relics on plinths allows mage convocation during the summon initiate ritual. This allows you to both choose the faction (race) of the summoned mage and for them to equip any faction specific relic as long as it is of the same or lower level as the one displayed on the plinth.

Any relic attuned to a mage will gain XP as the mage gains XP and will level up. Important thing to know is that relics will keep leveling up if the mage gains XP points even if the mage has reached their current max level cap. Therefore, it is useful to assign relics to initiates as soon as they enter your school and start doing trials. Then again before turning them into apprentices or graduating them check if there are some other relics that they could now equip (as their mage level has increased) as they will gain XP again during the ritual. This can help to level up relics quickly.

Each initiate starts with 3 relic slots. First slot is always their faction’s slot, and the second is always their wand element’s slot. Third slot is random – it can be either another faction, element or ‘rare’.


The number of slots can be increased to 4 or even 5, and that is the main goal for late game play. Summoning gifted initiates is expensive but they will come with 4 slots by default. Another way to get the fourth slot is by upgrading your initiates into Arcanist apprentices (choosing an element two ‘away’ from their main one), with that additional slot belonging to the element that they are apprenticed in (or a random one if they already have it).
For 5 slots the most reliable way to get them is to take a gifted initiate and make them into an arcanist.

Less reliable way of getting additional relic slots is to send your mages (preferably arcanists) to the second dragon quest, where one out of three will be chosen at random to gain an additional rare slot.

Buckle up, because the next part will have a lot of tables.

I will not discuss plinth powers of relics, or go into granular detail on some of the bonuses that miscellaneous relics provide. There is a detailed list at the wiki[mindovermagic.wiki.gg], which is good enough (but I found some entries to be incomplete, and their explanation on how relic levels work is confusing). Instead, I will give a brief breakdown of the most relevant bonuses for attuning the relics.

Affinity is basically a type of the relic, and determines into which slot the relic can go.
Attunement power is determined by the relic’s Legacy. Legacy relates to which sort of bonuses the relic provides, and a character cannot equip two relics with the same legacy/attunement power, even if they would go to two different slots (such as two inspiring relics, one in wolfkin slot and one in diligence slot)

If you don’t care about all the details, skip the tables and go straight to the conclusions.

Here is the list of all the relics in the game that provide an attribute boost to mages.

The values in the table - HP, Mana, Power and Speed scale with a relic level.

So, for example, Level 10 Tenacious relic would give a character +250 mana points

These relics increase the maximum skill level of a mage in an element, and are the key to unlocking ultimate spells and creating double-major mages (with level 8 in two elements).

They also grant the chance for a mage to create additional gnosis shards each time a mage gets a skill level through learning or one of their students does while the mage is teaching them.

Be mindful that when assigning these relics to students, having a higher max level cap for a skill means that they will take longer to become fully trained. If your goal is to get them through their education as quickly as possible do not assign these relics to them until after they are promoted to staff.

For posterity here's a brief summary of other relics' attunement bonuses. I have a suspicion that some of the affinities are missing in this section. I fixed the data for the ones I've found, but couldn't verify myself for others.

Actually, quite a lot. We can learn which relics to keep and discard, which relic levels are the most useful, best relic slots for different purposes and that shattered might be the best multi-purpose late-game mages overall (but it might also be just my bias). I'll explain other points later, but let's talk about shattered now.

The reason why I say this is that while other races have 3 relics boosting their attributes, shattered have 4. Other races’ relics lean heavily into boosting their best stat while only one of them also fixes their flaws, while shattered are the most balanced over all categories, and most of their relics fix their main flaw (low HP) while providing other bonuses. This gives shattered a solid base to start from, and then on top of that, in late game, we’ll be able to pick and choose additional stats that we want to boost for the specific combat role that they fulfill.

Best relics for HP (and therefore the relic slot that you want) are Vivified (15 per relic level) and Tranquility (25 per relic level).

Best relics for Mana are Human (15 per relic level) and Diligence (25 per relic level).

Best relics for Power are Cultist (1.5 per relic level) and Temperance (2.5 per relic level).

Best relics Speed are Wolfkin (3 per relic level) and Exuberance (5 per relic level).

Shattered.

And finally, we come to the topic of creating OP mages. It’s all about covering for their weaknesses, and boosting their strengths. And as hinted above you will want as many relic slots on them as possible in the late game. So, a few examples:

For your Human pyromancer, you might want to lean into their strengths and further boost their Mana by putting mana-boosting relics in human, shattered and diligence slots, increasing the power of their flame lash to extraordinary levels.

Or you might go all out on boosting power for your fire+water Raven Cult sorcerer, with cultist, shattered and temperance relics, to make deadly fireballs and ultimate. Even bigger benefits of boosted power apply to Raven Cult or Shattered air mages who have huge damage potential.

Although in the early game I didn’t like lightning+air conjurers, in the late game they can be amazing, as the high level diligence relic can boost their speed very high making sure they go first to hasten and inspire their allies, and at least their thunderbolt will deal high damage, and you’ll probably be able to decently boost their power as well if they’re a cultist or shattered with their faction slots.

If you want to create double-major mages with two level 8 powers, you will need two relics to boost their skill level cap up to level 8, and so will need relic slots of both elements. The easiest way to guarantee that is to make arcanist apprentices.

As arcanists element combinations can be weird benefiting from disparate skills, I prefer using shattered for my arcanists as they benefit from their own relic slot boosting both HP, Mana and speed or power, and then another slot can be chosen to boost whatever their role needs the most, as I mentioned above.


Of course, getting the right slots in early to mid-game is heavily dependent on luck, but in the end game we can actually choose which relic slots the mages have thanks to Altar of Fate.

It’s not enough to just have the right relic slots on your mages you need to have the relics too. In the early and mid-game, again you heavily depend on luck. But in the end-game you don’t need luck so much, you just need to have a lot of shards, and bunch of relics of high level for each slot.

So, start doing what a mage school is made for and keep training and graduating a lot of students and apprentices. And I do mean a lot. And make sure that they level up your relics as much as they can as you’re doing so.

And hoard as many shards as you can. Having around 600 or so when you reach the Altar of Fate would be good.

In early game just focus on producing as many level 8 relics as you can. Some will be useful for your mages to boost their stats, and speed up work and research. One of the mandatory ones for me to display on the relic plinth is the one that gives 33% chance of more shards when learning a new skill.

Level 8 relics are also useful for displaying for student convocation, and in late game you can pulverise most of the useless ones into shards, and keep the ones that give stat boosts and level cap increase. Even level 8 relic is enough to boost your mid-game mancers with wand Tier 2 main element skill cap from 7 to 8 and enable them to use their ultimate spell and craft their element seals.

You need relics of at least level 11 in order to give +2 increase to the skill cap of the mage. This can help mid-game conjurers to get at least one ultimate in their main skill. In reality you’ll probably be creating lvl 14 relics, and in mid to late game you will want all your students, even trash ones to get Tier 2 wands and complete 4 trials before graduating or being made into apprentices. Level 14 relics that boost stats are pretty powerful already, and will be suitable to boost some of your mages even in late game if you have nothing better.

In late game you will want to give all students that you can afford to or that show promise tier 3 wands and complete their 5 trials to create level 21 relics when graduated or apprenticed and level 24 if hired as teachers. Relics above lvl 19 are able to give +3 boost to the element skill cap, and for stats boosts you really want to go as high as you can.

I have to stress – keep even trash relics of high level. It doesn’t matter if their powers are rubbish, all that matters is that you have as many as possible level 19 or above relics in element slots, and as high as possible level relics for faction and rare slots. We can fix their powers using the Altar of Fate

Altar of Fate is aptly named as it allows us to at least somewhat escape the cruel whims of fate / luck / RNG.

It is found in the Nexus in the Underschool, and as far as I know its location is random in one of the branches leading from the Nexus Doorway. You should try to find it as soon as you can.

It allows you to do 3 things:
1) Re-roll the uncompleted student trial on a student.
2) Re-roll a relic slot on a mage
3) Change the legacy of a relic

I’ll focus on the second and third power in this guide, although the first one is also useful if you get a particularly difficult platinum trial on your Tier 3 wand initiates (such as Platinum bliss seeker).

Second power of the altar allows you to change the relic slot on the mage – but their first two slots can not be modified, the ones belonging to their faction and main element. All the other ones can be however. It costs 3 crystal portents (equivalent of 9 shards) to get a new random one, however you will probably want to go with paying 3 crystal prophecies (equivalent of 30 shards) to take your pick of the exact relic slot that you want for your mage

Third power similarly lets you change the legacy of the relic. Costs are the same as above. Affinity, maximum and current levels of the relic stay as they are (i.e. you cannot change which slot it goes into, but you can change which powers it gives). That means that if you’re unlucky as I am and four of your first five high level relics had utterly rubbish powers, you need not worry. I simply changed the legacy of my tranquility relic from spiritual to bolstered, and instead of a trash relic giving attribute boosts at deaths door, now I had the best HP boosting relic in the game.

There are many other combinations for your mages in addition to the ones I mentioned for sure. I by no means think that I’ve covered every possibility in my guides, but I think that you now have the tools to experiment by yourself. Although the guide is all about using relics to create overpowered mages, do not stress yourself trying to get the ‘perfect’ combinations all the time. It can be as fun just using what the game gives you and making the best of it. I sure had fun with some of my jank mages. Between the altar of fate and dragon quests you actually have some options to stack the odds in your favor.