[MaxWilson]

I don't think taking blood on your pretender is a very good way to leverage into communion slaves. Either you have blood and/or astral already, in which case you already have slaves, or else you have to spent pretender time scaring up blood slaves to empower mages to B1. I can see blood as a good way to plug your *pretender* into an existing blood/astral nation's communions, but I just don't see it as a good way to bootstrap. It would be better to take earth/astral on your pretender and forge slave matrices.

-Max