I said I'd post a retrospective, right?
For my pretender, I went with an awake W3N5 Wadjet to boost my expansion. Unfortunately, I got lucky with my surroundings and it looks like most everyone else was rather unlucky, so my expansion in the first year painted a massive target on my back. I was pretty paranoid about being on the losing end of a 2-vs-1 war, so I joined the winning side of a 2-vs-1 war against Lanka. I got distracted, played too cautiously, and didn't commit aggressively to battle until I attacked Lanka's capital after several turns of sitting right next to it doing nothing. Then I durdled and did nothing of consequence (except losing my pretender in a really thoughtless way) until Ermor attacked. At that point, in a 2-vs-1 war with both Ermor and Therodos, I reacted too aggressively and divided my armies. I lost several battles I probably could have won if I had been concentrating my forces more, culminating on losing around 40? mages in one turn. Of course, even if I hadn't split up my armies so much, I'd have been losing provinces anyways. I think even a great player would have difficulty fighting two-on-one like that, and I am definitely not a great player.
I was definitely overconfident when fighting Therodos; I was quite certain C'tis had natural counters to anything Therodos could throw at me. I was proven very obviously wrong when Il Palazzo brought to bear a certain spell I won't name (to preserve the surprise for anyone who didn't scout out any of those battles) which, while not impossible to counter, I was certainly in no position to deal with at the time. I had hoped I could regain at least some dignity with my last-ditch fortress defenses, but alas, it was not to be. Those got swept aside like butter too.
At least I got to name a bane Tricky Dick, and his buddy The Gipper.