What's wrong with the magic item Christmas tree?

[StreamOfTheSky]

But that's the biggest problem.

The most "powerful" item you can craft is actually the good old wand of cure light wounds/lesser vigor.

This low level item is relatively cheap and quick to make but has such a HUGE effect on the game.

I personally blame THIS as one of the main reasons why 3e combat had to be so deadly.

I will agree with you, there. My last time as DM, I had a really savvy group. None had item creation feats, but wands of lesser vigor / CLW were cheap enough and useful to such a wide demographic that they could rightly expect any decent sized town to have some for sale. Sometimes I was able to just say there was currently a limited supply and they could only pick up one or two. For the most part, it became a "gentleman's agreement" that they not have more than two fully charged wands at any one time, which was still a crazy amount of healing. On the one hand, it's awesome that the availability allowed non-casters to "fight all day" if the DM had the will to not just let the casters pack it in early. I like the concept of letting the warriors recover completely between fights so they can continue to perform well combat after combat. But to have that constantly hanging over your head as DM, knowing that if the PCs survive by any amount of hp at all, they'll be good as new come the next fight? It did mean that in order to put the fear of DM into them I had to present a clear risk of death for at least one party member each fight for it to be dangerous. I couldn't just use low level foes to soften them up for later, every fight had to have enemies that could really damage them heavily.

I found myself adapting to this by conducting a lot of battles with waves of enemies, reinforcements coming in after a while. Sometimes pre-planned, sometimes as reaction to the PCs not being very sneaky and drawing defenders from other parts of the dungeon. Not having the enemies all at once meant they both could not be all nuked together and also couldn't overwhelm the PCs with a combined extremely high EL. In effect, it was like a series of fights in a "normal" dungeon where the PCs keep moving on and have no time to heal much, condensed into one massive, multi-phase brawl. That method tends to help remedy the wand problem, but I don't like having to run those kinds of fights the majority of the combat sessions.