Magic Wands Theory

Scapeartist and I were chatting about magic wands the other day. Like an awful lot of OUaT magical canon, their workings are vaguely defined, but this hiatus has me really bored, so....

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The main association of wands is with fairies, although not every fairy has a wand. Blue has one, as does Green/Tinkerbell, also Gold (?) who was killed by Rumplestiltskin. The Black Fairy had one (above).

Nova did not have one. In the mass fairy attack on the castle in "An Apple Red as Blood," the fairies use dust, not wands (this holds true in the S4 finale; Grumpy alludes to them using fairy dust against Snow's forces).

This implies that only senior fairies and/or those doing godmother duty have wands.  I think it also suggests that fairies -- with the possible exception of Blue herself -- do not have native magical ability. Their ability to change size, to fly, and to access whatever pocket dimension they call home is part of the state of being a fairy, like shapeshifting is for a werewolf. For them to perform any other magic, they must have a wand.

Blue's ability to revoke someone's fairy-hood further suggests that they are not born but created beings. This adds an interesting dimension to her Storybrooke identity as Mother Superior; quite possibly she is the progenitrix of all other fairies. As a bit of supporting evidence, I note that in Baelfire's day, no one seems to know about fairies. The entity later known as Blue is going by another name then, and has a much more mixed reputation than she appears to enjoy in Snow's time.
Anyway, so wands are mostly a fairy thing. They work by means of fairy dust, which is milled from diamonds, which are mined by dwarfs, which are another mystery. (They hatch from eggs. Fine. What lays the eggs?!) This evokes the  common fantasy trope of magic wands as batteries; they are a convenient, portable (stylish) means to carry around magical power.

This is a nice closed system, as far as it goes. Some fairy dust is used by low-level fairies going about their duties; most of it, presumably, goes to charge the wands of the upper tiers.  Those fairies are implied to have guardian duties over... well, people who are important to the story, at least. Those duties appear to be assigned along familial lines. (If Gold was George's patron fairy, are he and Cinderella related? Is there a comment in there about his persistent trouble with money?)

Where do the wands come from? The only entity specified so far to have created one is Merlin, who gave a particularly powerful one to his apprentice. If Blue was the original fairy, she might have created the other wands herself. Two points of origin might explain the fact that they seem to have two schools of design. Some are made of wood and have a natural look, while wands wielded by fairies tend to be made of glass or crystal and incorporate a metal accent.

That brings us to non-fairies who use wands. It appears that anyone can use at least some magic wands; Robin uses a stolen wand to heal Marian. That works with the idea that fairies have no native magic ability of their own. Other wands have stricter requirements on who can use them. That may reflect a different origin or intended purpose, since at least some of them appear to be specialized toward one or another use. The wand Emma uses in the S3 finale requires magic, and also has a unique ability to recreate spells performed in the past. The Apprentice's wand requires not only native magic but a particular sort of magic-user (the specs are a little vague).

One might wonder why someone who already has their own magic would bother using a wand? There seem to be two potential reasons. As with fairies, a wand can work as a power storage option. We saw that in S2, when Rumple took all of the fairy dust diamonds into the Gold Fairy's wand. That act gave him access to more power himself than he would usually have, and also prevented the wand-dependent fairies from interfering with his plan.

The second reason has to do with the kind of magic wands can do. Fairies use them to grant wishes. That's high-order magic, capable of rearranging a sizeable chunk of the local universe, an ability generally reserved for genies (and carrying a hefty price). They can bestow life (Pinocchio), transform and extend lifespans (Jiminy), and at least some of them can open portals to any realm, regardless of the level of native magic there. (Is that why Rumple started collecting them?)  It's possible that this isn't a separate kind of magic, just uses that require more power than mortals generally have available, but at the very least, it seems to need the extra juice a wand provides.