[Zechnophobe]

Okay, so clearly the Rune Mage was one of the last units worked on in the game. Right before release no doubt, since I dare say a developer temporarily increased their init to 20 for testing purposes (so they could always use them at the start of each fight!)

That aside, here's the setup:

Rune Mage has the Phantom skill. It makes a duplicate stack of one of your existing ones, but with only a percent of the total size. It can get up to 60% of the original size with 40 Mind runes laying about in your inventory.

Point Number 1: The number of Rune mages you have doesn't change this. A single Rune mage can make a 60 Royal Griffon phantoms from a stack of 100. You could go into a fight with 4 split stacks of Rune Mages, and a single stack of griffons, and by the end of the turn have 4 phantom griffon stacks, and 5 Celestial Guard stacks!

Point Number 2: Jarls and Paladins can give another turn to a stack, even if it has larger leadership (though not arbitrarily large). Somewhere around 34% efficiency on Phantom, you can phantom out a stack of paladins large enough to give the Rune Mage stack another turn.

Point Number 3: With level 3 in Rune Magic, your Rune Mages start with 2 Defense runes. A Mage can cast Runic Word twice on them in the first turn to give them 4 more, for a total of 6. You can then phantom jarls or paladins, have them give the Rune Mage another turn, and repeat until you've used them all up. All on the first turn. That's right, you could phantom 6 times (7 with wanderer scroll) on a single turn! Those 7 stacks could each be 60% of a single stack, giving you 430% of a single stacks worth of troops! That's almost a full extra army of guys!

Point Number 3: Sadly the Runic Word ability on the Rune Mages is broken. It does not give you more runes when you have more Magic Runes. Otherwise it would be even more ridiculous.