More thinking on S&A

[KissBlade]

Recently I was playing a strat with S&A according to one of qm's games I was watching.

Basically he focused on a dual bless strategy taking advantage of the water demons/fire demons with body ethereal to beat stuff up. N9W9 style.

So here are some thoughts I was having with this theme. Perhaps S&A is really meant to just be a conjuring theme. Their gem income is usually higher than the others while their gold is practically minimal and their troops really aren't worth it since nobles have no leadership. However, the problem with the conjuring strat is usually the mages often don't have enough path to do some conjuring and you'd need lots and lots of master of the five elements to hope to roll lucky and get either e2 for clockwork, n2 for a thistle so you can get vine ogres, etc etc. The main reliable summons seem to be the demons and spirits, neither of which are bad and probably can use a healthy support of the archers that TC gets. But what about the astral gems? What use do you guys use for them?

Further, what are the thoughts on w9n9 for demons bless? Ideally it seems to be that w9e9 would be better but TC doesn't have access to it. Perhaps Earth Mother's E9N9? But let me also point out, while EM is a better thug, Lady Fortune's ability is actually quite quite useful. I was literally seeing a good event combined with luck 3, turmoil 2, every turn.

What're current thoughts on this? Strats? Also what about even a rainbow great sage to research and cast summons with to use up TC's gem income for an early army?