[HoneyBadger]

What about your Pretender? Lots of nations (Abyssia comes to mind) get units that they have trouble summoning and using to their full potential, "out of the box". By putting a point or two of Death on your Pretender-especially if he's awake-you can summon mound kings, counts, etc. without having to worry about random picks. It's not ideal, ofcourse, but even making him asleep lets you decide whether you want to try for a random death pick (if you're close to Pythium) with those relatively inferior mages, while still knowing you have a Death mage waiting in the wings. And that choice between two ways to go can be important in the early rounds of a MP.