You had dropped to zero dominion in your home province, last I saw - only one other province had a black candle of yours. It's amazing what surrounding someone with sacrificers weilding jade knives can do...
Now, it was the number of priests you had who happened to also be mages that proved to be my downfall.
If nothing else, my Mictlan experience has taught me to respect their dominion-spreading powers. And I only had a base of 5 on my pretender... It'd be scary to see what they could do if that were doubled.
We're talking about a not-so-large map, and parameters that make things a little different from Yet Another Dominions Game.