[llamabeast]

I would say dormant rather than imprisoned is quite important in a rainbow pretender. When he first wakes up you will want him to wander around site searching. It takes quite a while to cover ground site searching, and then bootstrap your way into the different magic paths, and being imprisoned is basically a 24-turn setback to that.

I went for level three in a number of paths because that's all that's needed for most things - for earth, water and nature, level 4 will only rarely be necessary, and level three is definitely enough to get going. Obviously level 4 gives you a minor bless, and is better if you can afford it. Air 4 is a good idea though, because the air boosters are level 4.

I haven't particularly missed having fire and astral on my pretender, with the odd exception (he can't make moonvine bracelets). Your mages can do most useful fire/astral stuff, such as forging fire/astral items, fire/earth items, and just high level fire and astral spells (I've had a couple of S4 guys, although that's very lucky, and of course F4 is very common).

For Evo, levels 3 and 5 are the major milestones in my opinion - fireball and falling fires respectively. Fireball is enough to make your mages very useful. If you have 10 or 20 fireballs flying towards your opponents every turn they won't last long. Phoenix power (Conj 3) is very important to make your mages more efficient though.