[Baalz]

The mistake to MA Argatha is to think their troops are those crappy things on their roster. Yeah, they blow and there's not really any way to get around that. Good news though is that their national summons are very good and you can get them early enough to help with indie expansion and your first war. *Those* are your troops, and they're effective in small enough numbers that they can be your mainline troops much of the time. Your mages (properly leveraged) are also very good combat mages. True, you're gonna struggle in the very early game before any research is done, but if you're clever you should have a very tough army right around the time all the indies are snapped up and a good chance to roll over one of your faster expanding neighbors before his larger size can really be leveraged. Those dominion boosted golems are pretty viscous against light enemy mage action, and the golem crafters scale up very nicely as research progresses - not to mention the higher level summons like umbrals and marble oracles. The very early game is *very* tough, but you have a pretty wicked power curve from that point.

Those golem crafters I think are mages which you have to have a little bit of vision to really appreciate. As configured by default, they're fairly meh. Once you really appreciate their strengths though watch out!

Maybe I'll write a guide this weekend.