[Sombre]

I generally point new players to Abysia because it has lots of pretty battlemagic, it's very straightforward and you can see how powerful magic can be. You also can't hurt your own troops with friendly fire and you get some neat sacreds and units to play with as well as lots of gems to experiment with fire spells.

As for the pretender, I suggest a rainbow (a pretender with relatively low levels of magic in lots of paths) so you can try out more spells should you wish and find more interesting magic sites by searching.