[Executor]

Taking luck only to maybe get a national hero that has a little blood doesn't sound very productive to me. One would be better off summoning Lamia Queens. I'd take misfortune, you need the points there.



I'd say the hardest thing about Marverni is precisely the Pretender design.
You need good scales, there aren't many negative scales to take to gain some extra points.
You could use a SC pretender very much since your start army is crap, and possibly only Monkey (Kailasa, Bandar Log, Patala) start army is worse.

Having a rainbow mage for research is also important to get the spells you need to protect, body ethereal being the most important IMO.

So, IMO, an awake pretender is a must, relatively good scales too, and those two are hard to combine with no free points.
I'd recommend a PoD or a Ghost King as SC pretenders. You have the most important magic paths, only need death, those two cover the death path. Fire is irrelevant and while air is useful it's not vital.

For a rainbow pretender I'd probably take the sage, rush to conjuration 3, alteration 3 and construction. Get a few firbolgs, equip them, buff them and win a fast war, keep low for a while, research and unleash hell.