MA Argatha - go punch a mountain

[Baalz]

Ah, yes, you missed one twist I suggested which is giving your golem crafters lightning rods to keep them from being picked off as the only valid targets for lightning spells. 100% shock resistance for your whole army. I thought you might be thinking about mammoths as they're really the only thing MA Caelum has a prayer of fielding effectively, but there are also quite a few mammoth counters available to MA Argatha along the paths of research I'm suggesting. They're not completely shut down, to be sure, but it's still going to be a struggle for Caelum I think.

Crushers are size 6 and just a couple are a brick wall that mammoths will never break through by themselves. They'll have an in dominion hitpoints over 200 so anything less than massive lightning spam will take many rounds to blast them down from long range while the flying mammoths hold still for point blank magma blasts (or simply magma bolts if it's a small number buffed by gift of flight). Heck actually if you're trying to take the crushers down with lighting its a pretty tough combo to do flying mammoths at the same time because your mammoths are going to take significant friendly fire. Against large number of non-flying mammoths penetration boosted curse of stones is going to utterly dominate them - I'd bet 40 mammoths wouldn't make it through moderate PD against this spell to get to the mechanical men holding to get buffed from the back row - particularly if you hold a few bottles of living water (ice elementals!), summon a couple fire elementals, hit them with a couple prisons of fire, pelt them with massive magma blasts, and/or stack on rigormortis - which is what you're looking at by the time we're talking about mass flight. If you feel like getting your pretender involved horrors are another fabulous mammoth counter, both sending and calling. If you can line up some rings of tamed lightning (scarcely a tough trade proposition) stick a rat tail whip (+3 animal awe) along with a blood thorn (he's gaining life) on a marble oracle (don't forget a ring of frost to!) and you've got practically an all-in-one anti-caelum silver bullet (heheh, he's a holy avenger to, extra nice against the mammoths). Oh, that reminds me, simple smite spam from several oracle of the ancients will stop moderate mammoth action dead.