[HoneyBadger]

Try Tien Ch'i in early games against Helheim on small maps-and especially maps which are continents with no islands. Use your chariots and warriors of 5 elements with lots of support to capture provinces and your national archers and massive amounts of cheap pike plus lots of province defense to take away provinces from Van, ensuring they can't capture them back. Make sure you've got better scales than they do (if they're using high bless strategy, you will) and build temples like crazy on those guarded provinces. Eventually you should attrition them to death and be able to build an army strong enough to take out their home province. Once you do, destroy their fortress! The reason for this is, if they happen to capture the home province back, it gives you a handful of rounds to take it back before they can get the fortress set back up and start rolling out the sacreds again. Use your whole national budget if you can for a couple of rounds and really build an ungodly force on that home-you don't ever want them to get it back if you can help it(see above)-and guard the surrounding provinces just as well if you can-after that, just demolish them slow and steady. As far as magic goes, Tien Ch'i has excellent rainbow mage-priests, some of which can fly, so you can beat them magically as well as economically, so long as you're better at holding the territory you've got than Helheim is.