[HoneyBadger]

Oh yes good point, I should add that Smoking Mirror with starting Dominion 2 gives you just a little edge on the normal Dominion 1 rainbow pretenders, for free, helping you avoid Dominion-Kill for the first round or two, so you can start blood-sacrificing.

Baalz, I tend to avoid national troops for just that reason-because you're going to lose population and income eventually anyway due to blood-hunting, no matter what scales you have, so you aren't really hurting youself badly if you dump most scales and aim for summons which are independent of gold income.

By the middle of the game, you should actually have less of an ability to generate new national troops due to attrition than you will the stronger summons, if you choose to concentrate on troops instead, especially compared to someone clam-spamming with Mictlan (and you should be, because Wish becomes very important, especially since there seems to be a bug with blood-hunting and Mictlan where you stop getting bloodslaves even when you're supposed to, after a while-and the ability to summon up a few Lords of the Night (and Gorgons and Ancient Krakens, etc.) by end-game doesn't hurt anything, either).

And they will be FAR weaker on a 1-1 basis, both as basic chassis and from bless.