Come on guys this shouldn’t be rocket science. Having a portal to the two main faction cities and 1 to each expansion is very reasonable.
If you really want to make Mages valuable, rather than taking major portals away from everyone else, give them better portals. A mage with a portal spell that gets them to any zone they want to travel to would make mages very valuable. And don’t tell me that you couldn’t come up with an appropriately themed UI format for it either.