I won! Dang, that's a good one! Really fun, polished, and the perks are designed very nicely for the space.
20 waves seems like a lot to me, at least for how slowly I was playing because I want to seek out the best words I can. For the complete game I can imagine you taking it way further than this though.
I think it would have been really cool if hunting for long words seemed more viable, and to that end I think you'd need something like "destroy one letter for free each turn" or "swap two letters" to try to build something. If there was a "long word build" with the gold brick I could even see destroying multiple letters per turn.
I'm also curious how the word detection works, because I definitely...punched in a lot of words I did not recognize at all. "Stap," for example. I couldn't figure out the rhyme or reason to it accepting certain "fake words" but not others. I assume English is not the only language it's tracking, because "ara" worked at one point too lol.
Anyway, very interesting, very well-designed. Great job!