You and I are cut from the same cloth. (not in order)
re: the malz build, I consider it a tear-based build, so you should try to start slow by maxing out your DoT farm and not worry about champion kills or ganks. Once you have the tear, then you're building CD/mana to farm it faster, so then you've got a tear, lucidity, and tome (blasting wand last), and only then are you starting to get some real AP with an archmage or whatever, and you can worry about trying to win fights. Malz doesn't have amazing range, but it's enough to play mid, so you can just farm farm farm until you've got your core CD and get to building the AP. I play most of my builds for the late game and my malz build exploits that; if you want more punch in the early game, you'll need to pop in a little defense (something cheaper and more effective at lower AP than a hextech revolver, like merc treads, doran's ring, chalice, or maybe a kindle gem) and drop the archmage, which relies on high mana regen and low cooldowns - a farming caster build that can't be wasting early game money on AP.
