Very fine material. Thank you Baalz for another great guide.
Your guides are far more than a dried up articles about how to this or that. They actually capture the imagination and make you want to try the shiny new toys you describe
Couple of comments:
1. I 2nd Micah's comment regarding undead mastery and wanted to add that there are a bunch of spells that will mess badly with your strat.i.e. DtD/wither bones spam, solar brilliance, master enslave, Purgatory. Worst are the enslave spells that will just steal your vamps.
2. Storm will kill the vamps flight. No more swarming the buffing SCs. An example: Imagine 3-4 colonies getting cloud trappezed by a mage squad. One carries the SoS, first turn the vamps start crawling towards them and the lords cast their B/D spells. Then the mages go and cast undead mastery/master enslaveX(# of mages -1), last mage casts VoR. Voila, I just stole (some/most of) your precious vamp
Personally when I see an opponent in MP that has tons of Vamps running around I start to think hey, here's someone who won't stray away from his dominion and then I start making builds for undead mastery.