poison is great!...for the first couple of levels with poison gems, and for the level with some traps pre-built (you can beat it with no skillpoints spent thanks to poison traps)...but it scales even worse than Bloodhound(which at least will let you beat the main game).
It is a glitch in the game. if you start with the smallest possible mana pool, switch on auto-extend mana pool, then "x" the wild gem, you can press M as often as you want, it will give you infinite mana... then you can make a huge gem before you even started wave one.
But then you can't play anymore, because the game freezes. So... no need to try.