[Dragar]

Interesting discussions, so many options!

In terms of the offensive blesses..

Fire vs Death

I've tried running death blesses a few times and it really never does it for me.. MR isn't really all that harder to boost than FR when you're talking about a fairly easy check - Antimagic will do the trick. And the attack bonus is huge, especially given that you want to use an offensive bless on units that have multiple attacks.

Causing afflictions with area of effect spells seems like an excellent idea, but in general it doesn't change the course of a battle that much, whereas the F9 bless can be devastating, especially early game

The only reason to take a death bless over fire is for the death magic itself, naturally D9 offers up a lot more options than F9. Also if one was only taking a single bless you typically have a D3 base option for a cheap D9, whereas there isn't much Fire on offer

Fire vs Blood

Blood is normally regarded as the poorer cousin of blesses, and the lvl 9 bonus is certainly pretty lame, but the lower levels are pretty good for mictlan. Adding 2 or 4 strength adds a lot of punch to already strong units, and combines well with a minor fire bless without hitting the huge cost.

What is particularly nice is that (in CBM) the Fountain of Blood gives you Blood 3 for zero points pretender cost and a dom of 4, which also makes the high dom you want very cheap. The in-built 3 blood slaves/turn and hunting bonus means you get into blood very quickly once he is around. Immobility is a pain but not a big drama if you patrol, particularly if you are able to run some Growth.

I haven't played around with it but would think you could go dormant with B6F4-6 and have fantastic scales with an easy in to blood early on, while still giving your sacreds some decent punch. With the research you can accumulate with good scales that opens up other paths with the high level blood summons. Alternately imprison him and open up another path to level 4, such as earth (blood stones, father illearth)