Only At-Wills and Dailies for Wizards?

When the Essentials Assassin playtest came out, one of the neat things the designers did was to give assassins a death strike ability. It's the only encounter power assassins have, and what I find particularly interesting is that an assassin's encounter power damage "budget" is rolled up into this one power. That is, while some classes at 3rd level have two encounter powers that do basically 2[W] damage each, the assassin has one power that does basically 4[W]. In the long term, the assassin has the same damage output as any other class, but it does so all at once, basically. As a result, the assassin must carefully use his death strike ability when he has an advantage.

Here's my crazy idea - what if wizards had no encounter powers and relied primarily on *dailies*? Of course, the wizard would still have a few basic attack spells (perhaps magic missile plus two other at-wills, like what the Essentials mage has) that allow him to manipulate the battlefield on a round-by-round basis. However, a first level wizard might have no encounter attack spells but be able to cast two or three daily attack spells per day (if there are normally about four encounters per day, then I figure 4 encounter powers are roughly equivalent to two or three dailies).

Why would I want to do this? Well, Essentials has gotten me to think about how things were in earlier editions. One of the hallmarks of pre-4e wizards/mages/magic-users was that they only had a few powerful abilities, but those abilities had the potential to be real game changers. The way earlier editions "balanced" this was to make wizards very weak at low levels but very strong at high levels. I agree with 4e's general disapproval of those kinds of balancing mechanisms, but I think that skillful management and application of power is what makes wizards "tick."

I feel a focus on dailies would do that for wizards. And, in a manner like the Essentials assassins, as long as the wizard's damage "budget" per day is roughly the same as other classes it should be kosher.

The biggest problem I see is that a wizard might horde his dailies and "blow his load" for the most important encounters. To minimize this temptation, I'd like skillful wizard players to recognize that hording dailies can be inefficient (allowing monsters to deal more damage, etc.). I'm also wondering if it might be worthwhile to make wizard dailies more costly to use, such as costing a healing surge.

But there you have it. Comments?