[Agema]

When thinking about sending out your astral pretender to fight, you'd want to consider the astral capabilities of your opponent. If your enemy can get within 3 astral of you easily (e.g. S1 versus S4 pretender, S3 versus S6 pretender), don't.

After that, it depends on a simple cost/benefit analysis.

S3-4 mages are usually only rare, cap-only. I don't seriously believe anyone would expend them magic duelling an S+5 pretender, as they'd only have a 3% chance of success, and anyone desperate enough to waste that many expensive mages when the other guy can just call his god back (albeit with -1 all paths) is either doomed or so powerful it doesn't matter. It's quite possible your average opponent wouldn't even take the risk against an S+4 god: 8% chance means stastically you'd very likely lose more than half a dozen. On the other hand, someone might very happily expend a ton of cheap 60-100GP S1/S2 mages to kill a S+5 pretender, and certainly an S+4 pretender.