[Aleph]

Some good feedback here. Not a unified response, but good food for thought.

I play entirely single player games, and I like long games. I'm definitely going for a sustainable blood economy, so I'm thinking at least Growth 2 to offset patrolling losses and to drive compound interest. I'm also entirely behind Turmoil 3 / Sloth 3 / Luck 3 - the cash and magical profits derived thereof (allowing for both more rapid expansion, and the upkeep of more mages to balance the myriad roles of hunting/casting/forging/searching/researching/sacrificing), plus the added enjoyment of better Crossbreeds when you want your Priest Kings to summon in bulk, seem useful enough.

That said, the Smoking Mirror is a nice base for a sustainable approach as well, and I missed out on how good he could be as a bless base when looking at him earlier. Lots of mixed options with F9, Dominion in the 5-6 range, Turmoil/Sloth/Luck 3 and Growth 2-3, including water/blood/astral/death 4 for nice well rounded boosts or dropping death to 2 and taking earth 2 for forging utility. While I like W9 as a blessing, Mictlan lacks any pretenders able to really take advantage of it and still have a breadth of options.

Other queries
1. Does Nature bless give regeneration to all your blessed troops? I thought there was a bug that it only added to spell based regeneration.

2. Can you assume that you're going to have empowered a Moon Priest with Earth before an imprisoned Pretender can wake up? Can Onaqui or Nahuali end up with Earth as a random pick? (What does the Nahuali ?0 pick even mean?) Someone needs to make the tools necessary to bootstrap pretender astral levels higher and to kick off the Blood Stone creation.

3. Why does a Nahuali want to be a turkey?