Better Know a Pretender: The Virtue

[Amorphous]

First a rather important omission in my former post: The Virtue needs dom 10 to be able to expand properly without equipment or extra magic pics - at least in my opinion. The difference between +4 and +7 awe is huge when it comes to independents.


Regarding routing the independents I have never noticed a problem and you certainly do not need to kill off half of the army in order to rout them. While not being at all certain as to why, I guess that it might be because at least the more numerous indies tend to be organized in units and once you rout a reasonably big unit, the rest of the army soon follows.

As for extra magic paths it mostly depends on what nation she is used for. Death can be fun and make for a very effective SC with fear in addition to the awe and the very good spell selection from that school, but ultimately I usually go for earth or nature, as that works well with the national mages I tend to use. This is certainly a situation where it varies by nation, though.
Generally, though, I find it too expensive to go for D5, especially as it is not as good as dom10 for initial expansion. To me it seems that air/death would work best if you go for a sleeping Virtue.



Regarding CBM:
Though I do not really play CBM, I do have a copy in order to be able to adapt some what I see here on the boards, and as far as I can see the Virtue costs exactly the same here. Am I missing something?

Furthermore, while the change from A2 to A1/S1 makes her pretty perfect for EA Arcoscephale, it tends to make her more expensive for a lot of the other nations that can use her. I more or less always want A4, for early booster access if nothing else, and as mentioned earth and nature tend to be my preferred additions. What this means is that you need to fork over an extra 24 points for air and since you are eventually going to use her in combat, you need to pay at least another 24 - more likely 48 - points for astral that you probably could use better elsewhere. With the low initial paths there are virtually always a better pretender to choose if you want a accomplished caster in either - or both - schools. As I see it, the changes mainly detract from her charm as a rather fragile, but cheap and flying high dominion chassis for air access with SC potential.