I almost went with Wood Elf for my first file, but chose High Elf at the last second because I wanted to play around with the magic more since I've played Fallout extensively but never the Elder Scrolls. I'm a bit all over the place with my Battle-Mage, but it usually works pretty well. Next time I'm definitely going to put more emphasis on Archery early on.
From my own experience and what I've seen in this thread, "battlemage" is code for "it's still early and I'm just freaking around with pretty much everything" aka "I haven't chosen a major yet"
