YouTuber jBrereton is an experienced contender in Dominions 4 multiplayer games. Here he is playing as Kailasa as a handicap, as they are generally considered an underpowered nation. To perform well with them, jBrereton has to know and leverage every advantage he can find.
Most nations have a powerful mage type that can only be recruited in the capitol. Often, these top shelf mages are slow to recruit, meaning each one takes two turns to produce. Kailasa’s cap-only Yaksha and Yakshini mages do not have this drawback; each takes only a single turn to recruit. Assuming Kailasa has the income to bankroll such frequent and costly recruitment, this nation can potentially field twice their opponent’s numbers of top end mages:
jBrereton has opted for a Death 9 (and Water 4/Fire 4) bless strategy, meaning that his sacred troops when buffed with the Bless spell have their attacks enchanted to inflict magical decay damage. Kailasa has two sacred national troops, the melee Yavana and the ranged Yavana Archer. Sacred archers are unusual, and buffing their ranged attacks with the death bless sounded like a good idea to one commentator. jBrereton articulates that he has no plans to use the Yavana Archer, as they are worse than the melee Yavana at maximizing death-bless attack procs. The main points are these: the melee Yavanna has two attacks instead of one, and the single ranged attack of the Yavanna Archer is liable to wiff and hit empty battlefield tile. Melee attacks do not have this drawback:
To summarize: Kailasa despite being weak overall benefits from the ability to mass their best recruitable mages far more quickly than other nations can. Doing anything important TWICE as quickly as opponents is a very big deal! Second, Kailasa unlike the vast majority of nations has access to a sacred archer, and it sounds cool to use these archers to apply special bless attacks, but this is a noob trap. The melee sacreds have two attacks per round instead of one, and further the single shot per round of the archers is liable to hit empty tiles.
Both of these advantage are tempo advantages. Double rate of capitol-only mage recruitment lets more supermages hit the field faster, while other nations are still slowly massing theirs. Using the melee sacred over the archer is a tempo and value advantage, rooted in more rapidly and consistently applying the Death 9 bless’ special attack.