[Agema]

Mothers have a sufficiently low MR that there's not much justification spending gems giving them more against mind hunt, they'll still be very likely to fail. Fill the provinces they attack with cheap scouts beforehand, they should act as chaff to distract. Without a bless, you're also spending an extra 10N gems (assuming a dwarven hammer, 15 otherwise) on messenger boots and regen, on top of 7 (10) for the vine shield. That's not cheap for such a frail unit, but in general terms, N1A2 Mothers can make it as thugs.

And Lizard Shamans can only site search astral if you find any lizard shamans to recruit. I've played quite enough games where I could barely scrape together certain types of gems, never mind indy mages with the right paths.