Oops. There should be special italics for sarcasm.

You don't have to go pick the plants to get the ingredients for making Restore Magicka potions. The are commonly available in Alchemy shops.

Angel is an Atronach birthsign. I play dead-is-dead and she is now level 40 and nearing three hundred hours of gameplay. With just her potions, poisons, spells, an ordinary robe, and a silver dagger, she is by far, the most deadly thing in the game. Before she left the IC for the first time, she made restore magicka potions from purchased ingredients.

Restore Magicka potions aren't exactly cheap though and early on money is kinda hard to come by.

The potions are expensive but the ingredients are the cheapest (2 Septim ea.)

Ya I know. I prefer the pre made ones though since they are either instant(vanilla) or short lasting but high effect(OOO) compared to home made ones.

I prefer the slower-acting Restore Magicka potions, because you get better return from them, so you need less of them. For example, if you drink one when your health and magicka are both low, and the total the potion restores is more than your total capacity, you can cast a restore health spell to use some up as it refills you. With an instant potion, any excess is wasted before you can put it to use.
Restoring health is something you do all the time, but there are other spells you might cast during that fill-up, such as light spells, shield, detect life and so on.

Early on, you don't really need to have actual potions. I've played a lot of atronach-sign melee characters, and one of the easiest ways to keep their magicka up is to just go over west of Skingrad and pick flax. You can pick 100 flaxseed in a half hour. Then hot-key the flaxseed, so you can "pop" three or four as you need to.

Later on, you'll need to use potions to keep up with a larger magicka pool, but by then you'll have advanced alchemy high enough to take care of it.