[KissBlade]

I'm going to have to go with qm on this one, you can easily squeeze an e9, n4, s4 dormant druid with order 3, sloth 3, cold 3, magic 1 while maintaining dom 7. You can splash on extra magic to your liking if you want death scales or even awaken it. As others have mentioned, niefel jarls suddenly becomes SC's out of the box which vets would use as the REAL strength of niefelheim (most vets tend to get skinshifters anyway till income allows some niefels to be fielded as cheap indie stomping forces since they're still more durable than shifters with e9/n4) rather than the niefel giants. The only real advantage to the awaken master lich is the possibility of earth gems which your e9 wizzie will put to better use anyway. Two gygja's with d2,s2,n2 spread among them will already cover the wide majority of the other sites with a skratti anyway. Even assuming very generously that you get a hammer before the first year (dormancy), you're basically weighing an extra hammer versus a bless to make jarls beastly as well as shrouds on your later skratti's. I just don't see it. Having your awake pretender out site searching means you're not even getting the research opportunity cost but rather banking on earlier earth gems? Also assuming you're using crystal coins to power your gygja's as thugs, they have /abysmal/ attack defence ratings much like the master lich chassis. Aside from being able to cast a few spells before encumberance eats them up (assuming farstrike doesn't), how does it beat just spamming some jotun jarls with blesses to raid some pd's?