Our beloved Pretenders!

[MaxWilson]

JimMorrison said:
You have to be very careful with the paths though. While I think there should be more pretender chassis that start with paths at 3, you must bear in mind that starting at 3 drastically reduces the cost to get a major bless, and starting at 4 would make it nearly a foregone conclusion that you would go to 9 if you used that pretender, because of cost efficiency. Starting with 2 paths at 3+4, would make a very cheap dual bless available.

It's possible to decouple pretender magic from blesses to some extent. For instance, you could make the Olm have E1W1 with a magicboost of +3 to E and +2 to water. In practice he'd be an E4W3 mage, but for bless purposes he's only E1W1. I haven't ever tried this but IIRC it's how dragons work (only in their case the dragon form has a -2 "bonus").

-Max