A PoD is quite good too .
Nationspecific the Nataraja is just awesome . Against indies he is already good and later with equipment he just rocks . Jotunheim and Pangenea have good nationspecific pretenders too .
Any indy fliers are bad
Against heavy knights 15 protection is not enough to survive the lance attacks . With mistform + ironskin you are relative save though . If you are not playing Arco or using Vq i think your pretender is not worth being risked against indies with Knights/Heavy Cav + X-bows .
You survive normally but the risk to get an affliction is quite high .
I personally mostly take A2 , W2 and E3 on my Sc-pretenders . Air 2 for mistform + mirrorimage but mainly for cloud trapeze as magic movement later .
W2 for quickness + BoW and later i can forge then some boots of quickness this way if i have no watermages like as ulm .
E3 is for forging dwarfen hammers + earth boots later and this way i can use later invulnerability instead of ironskin as buff too
I think the best indy expander sc is the Vq .
Later the strongest Sc pretender is probably the Nataraja , especially with Arco .
The problem is though that some of the summonable Scs are really good too and can give any other pretender than the Nataraja a really good fight and win probably .
Normally you prefer to equip your Airqueen/Niefel Jarl/Ice devil and use him as antiplayer-sc then to risk your pretender .