I would recommend this. I've had good luck with it. Make researching Mist and Storm high priority.
To begin with, you have good randoms as LA Midgard, getting into high level death and nature should be easy, and you can random up the occasional A3. Storm can be cast off the A3s, and mist can be cast off of any A2 both with help of gems. Storm and Mist together cut precision to 1/4 of its original value. This is great if you are spamming werewolves as you have no archers, and it also messes up enemy mages's precision.
Pretender - Any good dormant/imprisoned rainbow mage works. I would avoid paths that you can already item boost/summon yourself up through. This includes nature, and death. Focus on ones you wouldn't otherwise have access to like fire, water, earth, and astral. I find earth is difficult to get to level 5 for forge of the ancients. Astral also has a lot of boosters, but it's much easier to forge rings of wizardy if you don't have to cobble a ton of boosters together to get there.
I would recommend a mage with at least level 3 in any path that you wish to search with. If you search a province for level 3 in any given path, you've go a 90% chance of getting all sites of that type.
Scales
Dom 5
Order 3
Prod 3
Cold 1-2
Misfortune 2
Magic 1
This should give you plenty of points to play with. You may want to pickup growth 1 just to have that slow growing factor, and to help counter blood hunting if you plan to expand into blood magic later on.
Other than that, just build tons, and tons, and tons of skinshifters. You can stick with one castle for much longer into the game then other people. If you can, try to rush someone who has an awake pretender who is weak to swarming (dragon). Or someone who does not have a pretender currently awake. If you run into an undead pretender try either lightning bolt, or dust to dust. Unfortunately, your D2 guys have crappy precision, so you will have trouble killing undead pretenders in very high dominion with dust to dust.
Again, research to storm + mist for the 1-2 punch against archers. That's pretty much all there is to it
I've tried this strategy twice, and been successful with it each time.
Jazzepi