[Ironhawk]

Thunderstrikes are not exhausting if you power them via a communion. Take your 3A arch-theurgs and give them just two communion slaves. This boosts them to 4A which cuts the fatigue for the spell to 25. Then, since you are communed, each member gets only 1/3rd of the fatigue so we are talking 8.333 fatigue per casting. Not exhausting at all. But I would like to re-iterate that in anything but the smallest maps, your Theurgs are really what should be your default combat mage.

Harbingers make excellent thugs. If you have a decent bless you can have them bless themselves before buffing Mistform/Mirror Image. An easy equipment loadout (for base Pythium paths) for them is a standard set of "living" sc gear: Sword of Swiftness, Lucky Coin, Starshine Skullcap, Chainmail of Displacement, Boots of Quickness, AMA, RoR. Angels of Wrath are awesome anti-personel thugs, but unlike the Harbingers they cannot cloud trapezee which makes them a touch harder to deploy.

Edit:
HMmmm... actually my loadout above was based on the assumption of a decent Earth blessing (which I had in my last game as pythium). You'll need to adjust for Reinvigoration.