What happens if you...

[MKDELTA]

...cast Twiceborn on a pretender. Say, a Crone or some other wimpy thing as such. If the pretender dies, do you get a cool Wight Mage pretender, or is the spell a dud, or what?

[llamabeast]

You get a cool Wight Mage pretender. People even kill the crone body deliberately sometimes I think.

[Loren]

MKDELTA said:
...cast Twiceborn on a pretender. Say, a Crone or some other wimpy thing as such. If the pretender dies, do you get a cool Wight Mage pretender, or is the spell a dud, or what?

The AI did that once. Next turn I fought a wight mage pretender.

[Wick]

On the other hand, I understand Transformation is flagged so it doesn't work on pretenders. Too bad, I wanted a feeble minded foul spawn as god. Or not.

[Juzza]

I want a dragonfly pretender from that!! but you just get gift of health and boom, it's not feeble minded anymore!

[Tuidjy]

The problem is pulling the Twiceborn trick without getting a handful of
afflictions. Of course, if you have the Challice or Gift of Health, it's
all good.

[NTJedi]

During an SP game you may consider actually using Transformation so you receive a living pretender commander again which can cast twiceborn again. Thus your pretender is a healthy living commander with the Wight Mage as a backup.

Unfortunately Transformation is high on the research scale with several risks... so it's not feasible for a multiplayer pretender.

[Juzza]

And doesn't transformation kinda not work on pretenders?

[Zeldor]

And there won't be any magic path loss and so on?

[NTJedi]

Juzza said:
And doesn't transformation kinda not work on pretenders?

I'm pretty sure it works on pretenders, the same as twiceborn.

Zeldor said:
And there won't be any magic path loss and so on?

It's possible the transformation can cause feeblemind or death. These are rare... at least from the testing I've done. Any successful transformation will have zero loss of magic paths.