Good points, Amhazair. He just seems to be of very limited overall usefulness, I guess is what I was getting at. Not sure where you are going to get the Air boosters for him to make staves though - but they would be very interesting for Jomonese battlemagic in general, if you can get them. But it looks to me like your most likely path to that would be a 45 gem Empowerment, and a borrowed RoW forged by your pretender, then forge the first booster, and send the Ring back for other purposes - so 63 Air gems (with Hammer), and a pretender with at least 4S, plus however many pearls are needed to invest, depending on how high his Astral actually is.
Anyway, apparently these are meant more for flavor than anything, and the real game-changing stuff is still to come.
I must say though, it's very nice to have access to affordable summoned thugs without Death on your pretender now, that's a big plus for Jomon mid-game, at least.