[ywl]

Other than using bless effect, there is another approach for (mainly) regular Man, which is to use a cheap physical pretender, e.g. Wyrm or a Green Dragon supported by "Personal Regeneration". The pretender can lead a lot of Longbows when it soaks up the damage. Your expansion will be super-fast. With better resource and larger territory, you can afford a crone every turn.

One thing noticeable of Nature path is its good summonned mages. Lamia Queen allows you expanding into Death and Astral. Couatls are very good astral mages. There are also some very common nature sites that give your elemental mages. So, even with a magically poor pretender, your diversity in late game would still be quite impressive. The Warden will not have any good bless effects neither but they are still very good stealthy heavy infantry.