[DrPraetorious]

I've been studying pretender design for MA T'ien Ch'i, and this is my advice:
- You have healers. This means you want a living, awake, out-of-the-box, supercombatant pretender, non-undead. There are merits to either the Cyclops or the Wyrm - the Wyrm is much cheaper.
- Order is great. You get national bonuses for Order on top of that, so take Order.
- You also get bonuses for Fortune - specifically, you get very efficient bad-event prevention out of the minister of rituals, and you get a number of really cool unit-triggered events. So take Fortune.
- Your army is effective without being too resource intensive, and your mages (with the exception of the geomancer, who is kinda useless anyway, at least as far as I can tell) are not old, so you take Sloth and Death.
- You have every magic path except death and blood covered, so you don't really need magic on your pretender.

So, you can afford:
A domstr 10 Awake Wyrm, with 3 Order, 3 Sloth, 2 Death, 3 Luck and 1 Magic. For long games, consider 2 Drain and 1 Growth, instead.
A domstr 10 Awake Cyclops, with a 4th point of earth magic, 3 Order, 3 Sloth, 2 Death, 3 Luck and 2 Drain. Note that this guy gives your communion mages a bit of recuperation, which is not entirely shabby.

Attack blind with these units, when they get afflictions, send them home to be healed! Build up a massive force of archers, you can cast flaming arrows and wind guide as a mid game strategy.