Wow! Great to see the thread so active. I’m going to have to reply in phases lol.
I think this is a better approach, actually. When you get down to it, there really isn’t too big of a difference between certain tiers of mythics, let alone within a single tier. Troops are designed for different roles, it’s always going to be apples-oranges to an extent, so there’s no need to spend too much time trying to find the perfect hierarchy.
I would disagree here, on a few counts. Doomclaw’s spell is legit terrible - a max of 71 single-target damage (requires a looping team to get it), with a charm-like devour chance that is crippled by stealthy troops, immunities, barrier, and bless. Enrage is a nice status, but needs to be reapplied after each skull hit, and Doomclaw’s trait is unwieldy for that purpose.
Vash’s spell, by contrast, is unwieldy, with setup costs, but usable. Check out some of the builds in this thread, for examples where people have put it to good use. Enrage is nice, but curse is more consistently useful and more important in general I’d argue for devouring, stunning, mana draining, etc.
As for Famine, I think he’s really a casualty of how fast the game has gotten. How can team-wide mana drain be effective, when, as a daemon-mystic, you’re almost guaranteed to be slower than the defense you’re trying to take down? It can be good, but takes a lot more setup work to get there (a curser to take care of immunities and board control to get mana; I wonder if Medea is almost essential to modern Famine builds). Considering that Famine is probably better suited these days as a support to stronger troops (same as Champion of Anu), having so much setup cost is a big minus.
Pharos-Ra is always going to be a source of disagreement I think lol. From start to now, I’ve been able to pretty much get by without him for my souls needs. He may speed up player progression, but souls are still by and large obsolete for endgame players (from my understanding), even with the addition of elite levels. That hurts the argument that he’s essential for resource accumulation. As a troop, I agree that he isn’t on the lowest rung, but he ain’t great either (due to the total neglect of souls troops - imagine if he had all the toys Cedric does on the gold side!). Any build that features him is going to be slow by modern standards, won’t scale, and highly vulnerable to status effects.