All the participants focused very hard as soon as the match started. The words Ethor got were White, Sky and Bug and she needed to create a spell that would have something related to those words. Obviously it was not an easy thing to do and all the other mages were also trying to find out if they were able to create a magic formula using those words.
As for Hetharna, she actually got easier words which were large, red and tree. This sounded like a very simple thing to do but for that same reason, this was a hard challenge. If Hetharna just created a large tree made out of fire, she would not be able to get a good score as that would be very generic and anyone would be able to imagine something like that. So she needed to do something special that no one would be able to guess and that was a very hard thing to do.