[Micah]

Forge Lord is only good thematically. Why would you want to pay a bunch of points for an ability your national mages already have? Plus his paths overlap with the nationals as well, and new paths are expensive for him...Ulm is plenty good at what they do already, they're just horrible at everything else. Your pretender needs to cover at least some of those gaps, exactly as PvK said.

How does one counter lighting? Storm warriors/Gaia's blessing in combo should work, but you need an A4N6E2 pretender with Enchantment 9 for that, which seems a bit prohibitive, especially since even then you can only cover one army at a time.

Mind burn and other MR spells shouldn't be too much of a problem once you get tempering the will...you'll have to have 3-4 smiths casting it for it to get a decent amount of coverage on your army because the chances of it working on each casting are pretty bad, but it's pretty easy to spam when needed, and it should cut the damage from mind burn and similar spells down considerably.