how do you dealing with black dragons as a mage ?

[jwallstone]

There's one really useful tactic against Dragons that I haven't seen mentioned that I used for most of the Land of the Dead fights. I set up all of my ranged/magic/weak troops in a corner, then cast Ice Thorns to completely surround these troops (or Stone Wall if it happens to work with the terrain, but this happens less often). Surprisingly, most of the Dragons will never try to touch these troops, unless there's nothing else good for them to attack on the outside. I used Green Dragons usually and sometimes Lake Fairies on the outside of the "turtle" formation to inflict some hard-hitting melee damage. You only have to worry about using Time Back on these outside units. On the inside, I used some combination of Elves/Hunters with Dragon Arrows to take down large stacks of dragons, Inquisitors with Resurrect to recover losses, or Dryads with Sleep to disable dangerous low-level stacks. This worked extremely well, as I had zero end-of-battle losses for all of the fights.

The one trick to all of this are Red Dragons. If they see a tasty line of two or more "turtled" units, they WILL use their fire breath. What you can do about this is to position your turtle formation to reduce the possible positions from which they can use fire breath, which is usually possible. You can cast Trap in the locations they will land on, which are usually easy to predict. They will land on the closest available spot to use fire breath on two or more units, except when it will hit one of their own troops. You can also use your outside melee units (Green Dragons) to take up some of these spots, use Phantoms to take up more spots, or even use them to Drag some of their units into the line of fire, preventing fire breath from that direction.

Sometimes, they will be able to get off a Fire Breath at your units, you just have to do some resurrecting at the end, and it's no problem. But it's a world of difference from the chaotic dragon battles I had before this tactic, where you're seeing flights of dragons coming in and toasting your units that are dropping like flies all over, and trying your best to stop a stack here or there with Trap or Dragon Arrows, but losing tons of units in the process.

By the way, a final shout-out to Lina's Ice Thorns. I never thought it useful before, and haven't used it much after, but it's saved my hide in many tough dragon fights (including Ultrax).