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First, let me say this is currently a work in progress. Currently presented at 1st level with a little looking ahead.
Definitions
A Control Wizard is not about AoE damage. That's a Blaster. Control is about using status effects and terrain modification to limit the effectiveness of your enemies. Damage is a secondary concern.
Now, will killing a creature limit its effectiveness? Sure. But that's only an effective control mechanism at really low levels when monsters die pretty easily. As 4E turns into padded sumo fairly quickly, dealing damage fails as a control mechanism against everything except Minions - and as minions have 1 hp and virtually all spells do some damage, control wizards who don't focus on damage still don't have much trouble killing a bunch of them in one shot.
What control wizards do care about is putting monsters down and keeping them down until their allies can deal with them. Sleep is the premiere example of the control wizard ideal - it can potentially knock a monster unconscious and keep it that way until its allies are dead and it can be coup de graced. Now, that's not likely to happen given just the spell by itself, which is where optimization comes in.
Theory
The first thing to notice is spells which apply various disabling conditions, the most useful at 1st level being the daily Sleep, but others have some effects that we could care about. The second thing to notice is in order to maximize the effectiveness of a spell with a disabling effect a wizard must both hit the target and then get them to continue to fail a saving throw. As saving throws are now 50-50 affairs, this is as important as maximizing to hit chances.
There honestly isn't much we can do about to-hit except ensure we have a decent intelligence and hope our allies take some cool powers to help in this department. However, there are some feats we'll take a look at that might help here.
Fortunately, skewing saves in our favor is possible. The orb implement specialization lets a wizard 1/encounter make a foe take a -wis mod penalty to all saves against a particular power under which it suffers that was cast by the wizard. Bizarrely enough, wisdom is now *really important* for wizards, almost more so than intelligence. Yes, this only works 1/encounter against one enemy, but you should be able to get to a point where chances are when you put that enemy down they will stay down, making the combat much easier for team hero.
Some conditions are more desirable than others. Helpless is by far the best condition, followed by stunned. Dazed and immobilized both have their uses and are relatively common in the wizard's arsenal. Other possible useful conditions include slowed, weakened, and so forth.
Attributes
One of the things I've noticed about 4E is how much of the game is about attributes. As such, the attribute layout of the build is one of the most important decisions to make. For a control wizard, I'd argue that the following is the optimal attribute set (using standard PB).
Str 8*
Con 12
Dex 10*
Int 16
Wis 16
Cha 12
*can probably be switched with little downside
The cha 12 is important because when the character gets +1 to all stats then she'll have the 13 necessary to qualify for Spell Focus right away at 11th level, which will help with the penalizing opponent saving throws.
Int/Wis/Con gives you one decent stat boosting all of the defenses - as a wizard you can basically ignore strength and dexterity (as we passed up wand specialization), and charisma past 13 isn't important. More constitution would be nice, but we care a lot more about the intelligence and wisdom because that's where our offense is.
Dexterity may be a tempting distraction with Arcane Reach available. However, its really painful to get the dexterity necessary for it, and dexterity does very little for a wizard as a stat otherwise. Every point in PB is precious now. I recommend passing on Arcane Reach, and just choosing a good range of powers to reduce your need for it in the first place.
Races
Strangely enough, you want a race that's going to boost your wisdom more than your intelligence. Basically, each is a 5% shift in your favor either on to hit or on their saves, but you get to activate your orb ability *after* you hit, meaning as long as you've got multiple useful disabling attacks the limiting factor really is the saves - and we want to make it count. So wisdom is more important.
This gives us a choice of Dwarf, Elf, or Human. Elf is clearly a bad idea - we don't care about dexterity. Human lets us access the human feats (which are actually pretty good), but loses the boost to constitution. It also gives us another at-will power, which mostly means we can pick up something random like Magic Missile as we'll already have all the useful control at-will powers. Human and Dwarf are probably even picks.
Powers
There are a few things to consider with choosing powers. The first thing to look for is secondary effects - as a control wizard your job is to slap some sort of debilitating condition on the monster(s) to make them less effective. The second thing to look for is a diversity of defenses the attacks target. While defense scales with level, there is certainly variation within the MM, and individual monsters have weaker and stronger defenses. Being able to have a spell which targets their weak defense can prove to be really handy.
at-wills: Ray of Frost and Thunderwave give you the two at-wills that have useful secondary effects, which means some control in your at-wills. If you're human you get to grab some pure damage, ie MM, because everything else is crap.
encounter: There are actually a number of useful options here. However, both our control at-wills target fortitude, and sleep is a shoe-in for daily which targets will. This leaves Icy Terrain as the only useful reflex targetting control option for 1st level encounter spells. If one isn't as interested in diversity as that, Chillstrike and Ray of Enfeeblement are both decent options, and target fortitude.
daily: You take sleep, because everything else sucks. Your other option for your book can be any of the remaining - you're going to use sleep every day until you get better options, so your other pick isn't really that relevant.
Feats
Spell Focus is the only feat that really helps us with saves, and that's paragon level, so what we're looking for is feats that make us hit more often.
If we're human, the feat Action Surge gives us a fairly large to-hit bonus when we use our action point for a standard action, and a likely shoe-in. Other than that, straight up bonuses to hit are non-existent in the feats section.
The other tack we can take is looking for ways to get combat advantage. Wintertouched works with two of the powers i've recommended (Icy Terrain, Ray of Frost - could also work with Chilltouch), and gives you automatic combat advantage some of the time (for +2 to hit). It also combos well into a paragon level feat (Lasting Frost) to enable its conditions more readily.
Outside of that we're looking at general use feats. Improved Initiative is always good, and feats like Jack of All Trades or Linguist is actually mildly tempting (especially with the dearth of useful feats for a wizard). If you're human, you'll want Human Perserverance for the sweet +1 to saves. You may eventually be interested in Expanded Spellbook, but certainly not at 1st level, and given that virtually all your powers are combat options, having more options probably isn't going to be all that relevant (ie, without 3.x's crazy divination, you'll have to go generalist most of the time anyway). However, finding 6 (much less 7) feats you want before paragon tier is going to be really hard - here's hoping for a splatbook with some feats we'll actually care about in the not too distant future.
You can of course always set feats on fire for +1 damage, but you're playing a control mage, not a blaster, and +1 damage is so little you could forget to add it in and not even notice.
Skills
Choose some stuff. No seriously, it really doesn't matter. I'd probably load up on knowledges to be able to identify monster weaknesses so you can target low defense values. Avoid diplomacy - with zero guidance on proper DCs for various situations, diplomacy is magic tea party. So you might as well play magic tea party and not bother to roll.
Paragon Paths
While every wizard path is potentially of interest, the Blood Mage is by far the best package.
Battle Mage's "Battle Action" is pretty good to ensure you get that hit in, but his other abilities and his powers aren't anything really exciting if what you're interested in is control.
Spellstorm is playable, but its a type of control that doesn't benefit from our wisdom focus as much. Its best ability is the ability to get access to a power again, except what you really want is to renew a daily, which is hard.
Spiral Tower isn't the easiest to get into for most wizards (needing proficiency in longsword is mildly annoying), runs one ability off charisma, and generally seems more geared towards multiclassed characters than straight wizards.
By contrast, Blood Mage is absolutely amazing. Blood Action can turn your crippling control spell into a killer power simultaneously. Bolstering Blood would seem to just add damage, but its psychic damage which means it adds the psychic keyword to the spell. This is useful if you're interested in the feat Psychic Lock, which you probably should be as a control mage, as it lets you use it on any spell you want. And Burning Blood is the 'spend a healing surge to kill every minion in a 121 square area automatically' power. Which is awesome control through damage at any level, and the only type of damage-based control that exists at high levels (killing minions). And then there's the daily power, destructive salutation is simply one of the 5 best wizard powers in the PHB, regardless of level, and it stuns (save ends), which is perfect for a control mage. The Utility power isn't bad either. You may or may not care about the encounter power - highly dependent on what your party is doing.
Epic Destinies
There are two really tempting options here.
Archmage is the obvious choice, and has a lot of really great abilities. However, the best of them doesn't open up until 30th level, meaning you'll get very little use out of it. All the abilities are generally useful, and tend to make you more versatile or increase your staying power. The 30th level ability is power, but for such a short time its easy to discount it.
Demigod is the other good choice, and its +2 to two stats (int and wis for control wizards) is a great number boost that aids you in performing your role. You also get this benefit right away, meaning you'll be using the epic destiny benefit you really care about for most of your epic career. (and you get the satisfaction of turning into a god at the end of the campaign - no complaints with that). Demigod is the raw power choice.
The other epic destiny you can qualify for is Eternal Seeker, but given your strong stat focus on int and wis you really don't want to be selecting powers from many of the classes. If you haven't chosen to multiclass into cleric, you might search the cleric power list for some useful powers. But wizard powers often a pretty good control set - this seems to be a novelty epic destiny choice for a control wizard rather than something that usefully furthers your role/schtick.
Future Power Choices
In progress...
Edit: I completely misread Human Perserverance, its actually pretty awesome. Must've had 3.x on the brain. Recommendation changed.
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