I'm an agreement with the OP on this one.
While I don't think all cards should be made equal, Ice Bolt is extremely underpowered compared with the other Bolts available. If Water was a lot stronger than what it is this could be overlooked, but that is not the case.
Bolts have 2 functions: 1)Target the opponent for direct damage 2)Target a creature for control.
Regarding the first function, Fire Bolt and Drain Life are strictly better than Ice Bolt. You can argue the relative benefits of healing yourself (Drain) vs. more damage (Fire). But you CAN'T argue that doing less damage AND not healing yourself is anyway better.
In regards to creature control Ice Bolt fails as well. If your aim is to freeze creatures put Freeze in your deck. For Ice Bolt the operative word is "might". Plus, Water also has Ice Shield and Squid available to it which are renewable freezes. You don't have to waste deck space putting in a card that "might" freeze or "might" kill based on the target's HP vs. how much
you have. If your aim is to kill creatures then the freezing effect of Ice Bolt is completely unnecessary. If your opponent manages to bring a large creature out early you will have to use 2 or even 3 Ice Bolts to kill it. In that case you might be better off taking Freeze plus Shockwave. The only case where Ice Bolt is going to be better for creature control is when you know your opponent is going to have a lot of 1 or 2HP creatures or they are not going to have any large creatures out until late in the game. Both of those scenarios are unrealistic.
When designing your deck, in general you are adding a Bolt only for one of the functions. In the Fire Lance Sudden Killer deck (
http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,6758.0.html)(just noticed it was created by the OP) any Bolts you use for creature control is going to decrease your chances of winning--that's why it relies on the Phase Shields for protection. A similar Ice Lance based deck would take 50% longer to achieve the necessary quanta and would fail. In a drainer deck your Devourers are bringing in extra quanta allowing the Drain Life to catch up to a similar Fire Bolt in terms of damage. Water has no way to generate additional quanta. If you have to use a Drain Life early its ok because you are generally going to have other damage dealers(dragons or vampires) and Drain Life is probably the best control you can bring. Parasites and Liquid Shadow also take the creatures HP into consideration.
If Water becomes buffed enough through other cards then the relative weakness of Ice Bolt won't matter because of the strength of the element as a whole. But as it is now, why not buff Ice Bolt to make Water that much better?
