Hm i mainly use 3 kinds of pretenders:
Awake dragon, for speeding up expansion and often with lvl 9 for the bless too if i have useful bless troops.
Works well with nations like mictlan or vanheim.
Imprisioned oracle or fob for uberbless, cool for rushes. E.g. Mictlan f9w9b6 FoB.
Dormant SC god, like the risen oracle. When you have researched your first buffs you have your god then too and the 150 extra points give you 3 more scales
.
As SC god i only pick immortals, the other SC gods are imho too fragile now in Dom3.
The immortal SC god dies too, but because he is immortal it is not problematic then. And if he wiped out 50% of the emeny army before dying he did a good job
.