[Aleph]

Blood magic is a summoning school, by and large, with some amazing direct attacks (x3 rain of toads = 120 unrest = enemy fortress can't produce any more troops and takes massive income hit, infernal disease usually = dead enemy commander).

Lanka will slap anyone up, down, and sideways with an E9/N9 bless. Their high protection demons (forget name) and only recruitable-everywhere sacred are both unstoppable juggernauts under these conditions, and their early blood summons give them more of the same. Their Dakini and Mandaha's are also excellent SCs. Lanka needs to play a reasonable hybrid approach - that is, their basic troops are good enough that they aren't going to go entirely over to blood.

Mictlan - lots of ways to play it, there's another post on the first page telling you many ways to play it. However you play it, you need to be thinking about the following things. 1. If you empower 1 priest king, you can armor of thorns him into being a blood buff maker for everyone else. Once you have this, and starshine skullcaps for your moon priests, they have a lot of ranged offensive options which don't require them to move (although moon priest + starshine -> teleport if you want to five gates from your frontline). You can also use Sun priests with 3 blood buff items to forge soul contracts and pass them to commanders closer to the battle lines. 2. If you have growth scales your old age means less. 3. I can only think you aren't playing with reasonable blesses if you think Mictlans national summons aren't useful. Fire 9 alone makes Jaguar Fiends horrifyingly destructive, and I play a pretty modest (for Mictlan) F9B4W4N4D2 and still have room for a good chaos economy. 4. Your recruitable everywhere B1 priests are incredibly efficient bloodhunters once they have sanguine dousing rods. 5. Most summons (and I think all Mictlan's blood nationals) are free to maintain, while regular troops have maintenance costs; eventually you can bury the world under your demon hordes. 6. Your only regular troops worth using are Jaguar Warriors and Eagles.

LA Ulm - I started a question post about this quite recently, it's also still on the frontpage and there's a lot of good advice there (including a nasty trick with Summon Lamashtas). Apparently, they are about using Rangers to drive the early game, excellent mage/spies to disrupt enemy economies middle while adding in their very tough meatshields, and are unstoppable freespawn juggernauts late. I haven't quite gotten the hang of them, but the advice is there to be read.

I don't think mages of the second tier are meant to be battlemages - try their capital only recruitable priests with boots of earth + blood stone (through your pretender) + summon earthpower - between blade winds / curse of earth / legions of steel on your very tough troops you'll have at least some sort of battlefield magic presence, and with effective E4 + 4 points reinvigoration you'll not be passing out anywhere near as much.