[Ming]

K,

Thank you for your clarification.

I would like to offer a somewhat different perspective:

1. An awake pretender would give you more gold than strong scales by virtue of a faster expansion as long as you have O3 and G3. Please bear in mind that Bogarus has a weak starting army and would prefer C3 anyway because of its cold resistance troops. So your extra design points would only go to production, luck and magic scales, none of which is critical, or to magic ability. So an awake pretender is likely to be trading more gold and stronger start for less magic, not for less gold.

2. You would not be using your awake pretender to attack a dual blessed army without equipment. You would be using it to defend behind a 20 (minimum) PD and whatever troops you can scrape together.

I haven't tested this, but I would expect that at turn5 or 6 your awake pretender + PD + troops would have a very good chance of successfully defending against a (by definition smallish at such an early stage) dual blessed invading army without any equipment.