LE Mictlan woes

[ET]

Hey y'all. I've been lurking here for a while but this is my first post so go easy on me.

I've been playing around with LE mictlan for a while now and I'm totally in love with the nation. The big problem though is that I'm addicted to a water bless and a SC pretender.

My typical strategy is to go with a Dagon with Water-9 and dominion-9. I use him to get me started on land and take provinces without any losses to my army. After I get a big enough group of the sacred frog-men I plop Dagon into the water and continue with my conventional troops.

This all works great except that I'd much rather have a pretender with strong blood magic to make use of the millions of blood slaves I'll be eventually getting. Which leads me to my questions:

1) What does a blood-9 blessing even do? I try blessing my troops with it but I don't see any change (besides the str buff) on their info pane.

2) I feel like I should be trying to get the most out of my sacred troops, is there a bless that I should be using instead of the water that would be more effective?

3) Does anyone have any tips for fighting with mictlan without a bless strat? It seems like no matter what combination of their archaic troops I use I just take too many losses to carry out an effective campaign.

4) Is there some hidden gem of a spell that I could shoot for where water-9 would be required? That way I can keep playing the way I've been playing. I can get water 4 on my frog mages so it would need to have a steep path requirement to make it so I couldn't just cast the spell with one of them.

5) Is there something that I'm totally overlooking? Any advice you guys want to volunteer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
ET