[Corinthian]

Actually I suspect that good nature magic access is much more important than death magic for the purpose of tart spamming. Partly because GoR'ing of the 80% or so of tarts that start as non-commanders are more expensive than the actual summoning of the tart. And partly because there's only two ways cure the 80% or so of tarts that are feeble minded from the get go. Both of these ways requires nature magic.

Also Tartarians are a bit interesting in that they are great at breaking stalemates. Only two nations can make tartarians at the same time due to there only being two ways of healing them. This means there will be a tug-of-war for these ways. For example, I once payed 250N to overcast Gift of health in order to steal it from an enemy in a vanilla game once. It was worth it. So yea, Nature is much more important than death for tarts.

It also does not help that Bootstrapping death is very easy. Just recruit one of the D2 mercs (Göte or Nergash) and there you go. If you have traded for death gems you can have them summon a couple of revenants (Ench 3, D2 9d gems, comes with D1) and have them cast dark knowledge. Have the merc forge a skull staff and that revenant can make more revenants. Give the skull staff to Göte and he can summon a mound fiend. (conj 7) The the mound fiend can then summon tartarians eventually. (Skull Staff, Skull helmet, RoS, RoW = D7 = Tarts.

I have actually done more or less this in an MP game once so it is feasible. I got some D1 indies to site search for me though.