[Frostmourne27]

Most vaguely, I think you could say that there are three paths to magical victory: hordes, SCs/Thugs, or battle magic.

Hordes would be things like ivy crowns, vine ogres and the above metioned corpsemen. Spells that produce fairly good units, cost few gems and can be cast over and over by weak mages. Devil spamming counts, but only since slaves are cheap. Obviously, you need less devils than vine men, but it's the same concept.

SCs and Thugs would be high powered summons, with or without items, operating singly or in small groups. Anything costing more that about 10 gems per summoned creature probably falls into this group (I'm including things that probably wouldn't normally be called thugs, just as I put devils into the horde section - really, another catagory might be good)

Battle Magic is what Caelum does. Lots of mages, fighting with your troops, casting spells from lightning bolt to wrathful skies. This is pretty nation specific. E.g. Mictlan is going to have a harder ime at this than Caelum. Note that I haven't distinguished between buffs and killing spels.

Going along with these three groups would be magical support. This would be things like using summons and lucky randoms to diversify your magic, forging skull mentors/lightless lanterns, arming commanders with cheap magical trinket-esque items, casting helpful globals (the weaker, non game changing ones, like riches from beneath - this IS a game about magic, unless you play ulm)

P.S. Obviously, thats fairly rough and generic, and my three groups are in urgent need of subgroups, but it's late at night and I want to get some sleep.