[Baalz]

The thing you have to remember about Mictlan is `it's all about the bless'. If you take a dominion 7 or greater and a good blessing you'll be recruiting a force every turn that can take out up to medium strength indies. Taking an imprisoned pretender will usually allow you to get a second (or third) blessing, or at least an extra fourth level bless. Because the benefit of extra blessings is so drastic (a dual bless is often more than twice as good as a single bless) every ounce you can squeeze into it really pays off. Conversely you should already be expanding fast enough that an awake pretender won't help that much (with a high domain score don't worry about the dominion spread). I generally take an imprisoned immobile pretender, rely on jags for early expansion, then ice/arch devils as a mid game answer to other's imprisoned combat pretenders.

Honestly, if you want to trash your scales go with a triple bless...its much better than a tough pretender. The bang for the buck of a 20 gp triple blessed jag is pretty ridiculous, once you get three castles up there isn't much that can hold you off until research gets pretty far along.

On the magic/drain scale I have had some success taking drain and piggybacking off of the inevitable magic-1 neighbor and managing my dominion growth, but honestly this adds a lot of micro and inefficiency as you're shuttling mages around all the time, plus obviously theres some risks.