Steps in wand magic:

Break some branches from trees until you get the right one
Easy step once your aspects/staff magic are high enough to identify the rune of a branch

Find feathers until you get the right one (shooting birds, gathering feathers from the ground)
Easy step outside of specific feathers (vas-arn--phoenixes, silverfalcons, can be hard to gather)

The materials together are pretty heavy, you probably want a horse for a lot or rely heavily upon innrooms / lockers.
A horse allows you to be somewhat sociable while doing this.

Prepare a branch with the right feather:
Drains meaningful mana (a midbie can only prepare one branch before resting, beginner mage mentals might get two, super mage might get three)
This only trains "staff magic"
Has a relatively high chance of failure
(I'm not certain if failures train anything)

Engrave a mantra on the prepared branch
Drains ALL your remaining mana
Trains magic arts, staff magic, arcane runes, aspect runes
Has a relatively high chance of failure
(I'm not certain if failures train anything)

Using a wand:
doesn't train anything as far as I can tell.
You HAVE to hold the wand for the length of the mantra. This is a bit frustrating for the power level of alchemist wands but an understandable
restriction for mage wands. I don't think this should change but it should be taken into account when considering what mantras alchemists have
available (I.e. resist mantras probably aren't useful.)

An alchemist can easily brew mana potions, but it's like the mana draining step is so quick that it's almost not worth it.
You're really awake for something like 20 seconds and then meditating again. A potion just cuts the time on the meditate
step a bit, but it basically happens so fast that you run into the "too many potions too fast" drawback.

The mana rose is much better here, that lets you outright skip meditate steps until you're out of rose petals.

Lacking free magic is an issue in that it makes frustrating training also lead to somewhat boring results. (Again, resistance mantras we can
already brew potions for are a bit of a factor here.)