[Baalz]

Hmmm, if you've got Order-3/Luck-3 then Death-3 isn't nearly enough to push you into "poor income" territory, particularly in the early game. No doubt you can always run out of money, but I don't think you can blame the scales for that one. Sounds like pretty early fighting if skellie amulets carried the day, but from a theoretical point of view I'm having a hard time picturing how skellie amulets are going to be much of a problem for lots of (net) 0-enc thugs wielding firebrands supported by 0-enc heavy cav and well blessed flying sacreds (who fly in and kill the back row before the skeletons get critical mass). If you're going for skellispam for yourself did you try leveraging sabbaths with reinvigoration? That's a powerful way to raise a whole lot of undead. Your pretender could forge master/slave matrixes as needed to get svartalfs in on the action throwing summon earthpower on top of an E9 blessing on top of reinvigoration. Those master matrixes can pull double duty if you're clever by letting you stack invulnerability and fire shield on your fire brand wielding 0-enc thugs (followed by reinvigoration of course)...which basically turns them into the ideal skellispam counter. If you're feeling particularly fancy you can add on summon earthpower to the mix which will let you quicken self (via your pretender if you've no better options) and breath of winter...which doesn't help against skeletons, but does work very nice against most other things when you've got several thugs working together for big fights. I don't doubt what you're saying, but I have a hard time picturing how in an early fight Vanheim has enough death income to be anywhere near competitive with Helheim in dropping skeletons if that's the route you wanted to take...considering you're leveraging all that on D3/D4 Hangadrotts each one should be an almost never ending vomit of shuffling dead if you really focus on skellispam. If you're that hard pressed and are pushing skellispam forge a couple skull staffs rather than skull mentors and you're looking at D4/D5 guys with 8 reinvigoration hitting turn 6 with no fatigue (due to the reinvigoration blood spell). As to magic bows it seems like your first target in this strategy is thugs who can drop air shield, which seems like an ideal counter.

It sounds like you just got out played. No shame in that if you're playing against a skilled opponent, but unless I'm missing something it doesn't sound like the build itself failed you.