Alternate strategies you'd like to try, but...

[Kobal2]

EA TC as a bless rusher. Take an imprisoned god, tank the scales and give those Warriors of the Five Elements the dom 10 W9/S9/F9 bless they deserve. Proceed to comprehensively destroy your nearest neighbour ASAP to get more lands to apply your crappy scales to. Later, apply bless to hordes of sacred summons (flying dogs, heavenly rivers, heavenly fires). Laugh and grow fat.

I've been plenty impressed with handfuls of Wot5E as expansion troops under a W9 bless and I've been meaning to try rushing with them as it would certainly be unexpected of TC to get right in there instead of sitting back trying to fend off every rusher out there with your archers while researching like crazy as usual buuut... yes.

In the end I think the Celestial Masters would be a pretty big bottleneck - need them to be flying everywhere blessing raiders, but also summoning, site searching, forging... all that with crappy scales so few secondary castles to pick up the research slack.