It involved staking out a decent position by mid-game, turtling up, and then using remote attack spells (mainly Black Death, Tidal Wave, Volcano) plus Raven Feast. Besides the direct damage to your foe's income and the extra death gems this brings, it lets you manage the diplomatic situation. You can use it to weaken potential threats, incite wars amongst your neighbors, and to help keep the balance of power in your neighbor's wars. You want these conflicts to be as long, drawn out, and costly as possible. A few examples. If you have one neighbor that is strong in water magic, you can drop Tidal Waves on his neighbor in order to incite a war between them. Once they are at war, you can focus your remote attacks on the leader of that war in order keep the scales as evenly balanced as possible. When all of your threatening neighbors are fighting their blood-feuds against their evenly matched neighbors, you can snap up your smaller and weaker neighbors without having to worry about interference. Hopefully, by the time the bloody wars are over, you will have enough of a resource advantage over your neighbors that they will not threaten you. This strat can also be used to help break up any coalition that is forming against you.
This is of course a late game strategy. For Raven Feast, you will need to trade for 2 Air boosters, empower an A1, and then use that A4 caster to make boosters as needed for your other A1s. This is expensive way to get air casters (30 gems for empower, another 30 for boosters), but not much more so than summoning an Air Queen. And while the Raven Feast income isn't game breaking, it helps deflect suspicion from you and onto all the other strong air powers in EA. After all, who would suspect Argatha of having a battery of A4 casters? You also want to avoid using too many Volcanoes, as that would point the finger back at you. For the extra death gem income that you are pulling in, I would recommend the standard tarts or bane lords. I went with WraithLords since they could take advantage of my strong dominion during war and summon ghosts during "peace". The ghosts make nice underwater troops, can reverse the usual Argathan weakness to cold, and can be varied with the underwater fire elementals to provide another surprise. It also seemed very thematic that the dead pop of my enemies would be brought back as ghosts serving in my armies. Unfortunately, this strategy is way too expensive even with CBM, so I would stick with the stand bys.
