Advice for MA Man

[Jazzepi]

ano said:
Yes, it is hard to get. That's why I said about being lucky. I don't rely on this, certainly. However, I think that air booster can be got when you really need it. Either from trade (Vanheim, Eriu and Caelum have A4 quite often) or from that rare crone, or at least you may empower for 60 gems. I consider this being quite real in the long run. Anyway, I think that having fast expansion, good combat pretender and very useful bless is more important than being sure you have A4 for air boosters, staff of storms and whatever else you need.

My point was that MA Man has no way to increase their magic diversity. Early expansion doesn't help you at all in the late game when you get crushed by nations using a full range of magic items/spells/summons. Because you need both A4, and a way to diversify your magic, naturally leads to the choice of a prismatic pretender. Having a rainbow mage as a pretender is not just for the A4, in fact if you had a reliable way to produce A4, I would say you should drop it off the pretender.

Good players simply won't trade you air boosters if they're going up against you. This happened to me when I was playing in Aramadillo.

Here's a new build taking into account the fact that you can spam Auspex and Haruspex with other people. Then you can build a crystal coin, and starshine skullcap on an S4 pretender to get to rings of wizardy, which can then be given to an A3 crone, which you'll have quite a few of, to get them to A4 to boost with.

Great Enchantress
Dormant
DOM 5
O 3
P 0
H 0
G 1
Misfortune 2
Magic 1

MAGIC PICKS
F1
W3
E4
S4
D4
N1

This build is probably a bit better than my earlier one. Combined with your pretender, haurspex and auspex you will search your provinces for every E/D/S/N/A and 95% of the W sites while still picking up a *little* fire. Just enough income to let you forge key items. Possibly, if you get lucky enough, you could build the D/F skull for +1 fire, use ring of wizardy, and maybe a staff of the elements to summon either the king of banefires or king of elemental fire, though this is sort of an off chance.

Jazzepi