[Shangrila00]

2 things about Marignon:

1) You can get a great deal of diversity without needing your pretender if you are willing to wait a bit to get some gem incomes up, and you are better able to take that than most being a strong blood nation. Fallen Angels are awesome for diversity since they give D3, and the F/D crosspath. Being recruit anywhere, rare randoms like E2, F4, B4, and the E/S crosspath are actually reasonably reliably attainable off Goetic Masters, depending on the size of the map. That leaves nature, and nature is the one path reasonably reliably available off indies, S3 for rings, and A4, and yeah that does point to the Virtue pretender. This feeds into:

2) Dominion. Marignon is both best able to survive a low Dominion, and best able to leverage a high dominion thanks to a combination of bloodsac and recruit anywhere L3 Inquisitors that also aren't absolutely useless (though still mostly so) when not preaching. It's quite possible for a dom10 Marignon to never need to siege down and assault a fort. Burn down non forted temples with raiding, bloodsac away most candles (as in limited focused bloodsaccing as opposed to the kill the world kind which you are also ideally suited to doing), then use the Inquistors with your armies to preach away any holdout candles.

Consider a sleeping Virtue A4S4. Virtues need a bit of research to be useful anyway, and Marignon can expand quite effectively with crossbowmen and royal guards. With Dom10, you can afford +5 scales, say T1P2H3G3L3M1. As a blood nation, turmoil luck works out better than order, and growth 3 improves sustainability and reduces micro. I don't like going beyond turmoil 1 though, as it opens up a whole bunch of poploss events, and makes money a squeeze in the early game unless you get lucky with events. Taking a temperature extreme to afford production is personal preference, improving early expansion a bit, and letting you mass crossbowmen more easily, and either temperature works about as well. Heat makes devils stronger, gives you a few more fire gem events, and prevents the snow blocking pass and blizzard events. Cold makes frost fiends stronger, gives a few more water gem events, and prevents the lab burning down and raging rebel events, and might get you a very useful W2 ice druid. Yeah, the Virtue is going to die if she goes up against any astral nation, but then she can still be useful as a battle caster with your thunderstrike communions of Royal Navigators, or forge things. Empower her in blood to forge a robe of the magi if you've been having bad luck with randoms.

Going lower dom and a rainbow pretender is also viable of course. Consider a druid. E/N is the best bless for Marignon, since it helps both Goetic Masters and Angels.

Also, on certain maps, holy crap sailing. Marignon can easily make entire armies complete with full communions sailing with Admirals and Royal Navigators. Sadly, you don't have any fire mages with sailing, so no flaming arrows.