[licker]

A possible solution is to limit the amount of points available for scales (and dominion) based on the pretender chosen. This is an extention of the pooled points, but its tied onto each pretender so that you can further try to balance the combatants vs. the mages.

Or you can just make the design costs of pretenders higher, or give some pretenders lesser (or greater) costs for certain scales. Or you can specify a minimum amount of magic that a pretender must take (again this is like the pooled points approach, but it allows a little greater flexibility in how to not underspend the points).

There are a lot of ways to address this problem, of course in MP if you have a good group you can all agree on limits or restrictions before hand, though I figure that takes alot of fun out of it (short of handicapping players).