[Boron]

atul said:

Yea but when talking about hitting an army full of mages five (three actually, unless you have the hammer) clams do very little, don't you think? Of course, hardly worth flinging Murdering Winters around on random, but it's a situational thing. And MW does hit unless target teleports/gateways out of the way in time, it was the time Wolven Winter hits I was a bit confused about.

yeah but murdering winter does not too much too unless lategame :
because early-midgame you will rarely have a big enough target where it may be costeffective to use (expect enemy capitol perhaps ).
furthermore you need most likely construction 6 before to have a 5W mage + you need evocation 7 or 8 for murdering winter .

so the murdering winter is very situational and against e.g. caelum / jotunheim because of CR it doesn't even work .
with clams you can start on about turn 5 when you reach construction 2 so in earlygame .

then in midgame your clams should provide high enough income that you can chose when the special situations occur to convert some either to water or to fire for murdering winter or flames from the sky

clams are underestimated but once you reach lots of in late midgame or in lategame and get 50+ / 100+ clam astral income this is huge and probably doubles your total gem income and you don't have to pay too much for it too :
only your water gems early game and then convert the clam astral income always back to water when you can afford and don't need astralincome items like luck pendant .

when properly done clams provide you doubled - tripled lategame gem income .
and astralpearls are the most valuable gemincome lategame anyway because you can convert them cheap at 2:1 ratio to whatever gems you need or you can wish with them .

once reaching a critical mass you can increase your clams really fast :
from 100 clams you can cast either 1 wish / turn
or convert them back to water and forge 5 additional clams each turn without dwarfen hammer or 7 each turn with dwarfen hammer