I have thought about the mana system before and I think one that could be interesting would be a modified version that functions similarly to the spirit eater curse in MotB. The more mana a spell costs to cast, the greater it increases your "addiction" to mana, which decreases some meter and inflicts some penalties. This incentivizes a player to use magic more sparingly and not not just spam magic all the time. It also solves the problem of rest spamming (because resting will further the addiction) and it allows for powerful magic to exist, as you could have powerful spells which greatly increase the addiction and cause heavy player penalties for casting them.
I know a game with something similar to this. The jrpg Breath of Fire V: Dragon's Quarter has the D-system. The protagonist has the power of adopting a draconian form, which is a "I win" button. Like, literally, there is not a single enemy than can kill you once you transform and you can 1-hit anything, even bosses. The problem is, it increases you D-counter when you use it. The D-counter is always increasing through the game, functioning as a sort of time limit, and transforming makes it go even faster. And once it reaches 100%, you are killed and forced to restart the game. You are also pitted against enemies far more powerful than you (party level 30 against level 80+ bosses), so the game forces you to be smart to avoid using the transformation, but will try to temp you in doing so. Saves are limited, objects are limited, and fights are limited too, so you cannot grind. To gain more experience you have to fight big groups of enemies at the same time, but it is of course more risky, and dying means starting over from the beginning. Is quite an interesting game, but it failed because it was too different from others Breath of Fire and the time limit and resets weren't liked by many.