I've been excited to explore ethereal crushers as an early Kailasa strategy this game.
I lost this battle due to a PD dump and evocations (I have no resists) and simply having a small army, but the Crushers performed pretty well on their own. They survived a long time isolated at the front, tanking Rus's army, and most of them only died to to their leadership routing
Not sure that it's actually much better than point buffing sacreds instead but it might be decent...