[Cainehill]

Carrion Woods is certainly my favorite "dark" theme - it isn't a magical powerhouse like, mmm, Pythium and Caelum, but it's actually quite solid - it just takes some creativity with the pretender setup, which really makes or breaks CW, since there's no randoms on national mages, and the population dies off too quickly to make positive scales much good. ( If the black centaurs weren't capitol only, it'd be more viable to take positive scales and have a multipronged threat. )

And with some luck (which most nations & themes can really use) I've had CW be at least a top-3 nation in several 10+ player games.