I definitely haven't mentioned UNM Hydra. Expect other things first. 

You can use Gnishak if you wish with Aniri. As well as duo with Conan the Referrarian and Djarmarsa, his paired reviver. Each of those options works just fine.

Just finished my reworked third team, so I'll probably try to push back to G3 again. Only reason I'm in G1 is because I'm too lazy to bother with the effort to stay in G2.

Hopefully your third team makes G2 less effort then.

Once I geared teams to compete in G3 and G4, and got that bug back down to G1 when Tag fell apart, I noticed my defenses were getting me in the green in G1 and G2, after I switched the real ones in on Thursday that is. So it was considerably less work on the weekends starting from "defensive green" so to speak. That was a surprise, cause it def didn't happen when I first pushed into Gold.

I know I have to fight a decent number less fights in the G3-G4 space than @dthorne04 does, for example. To be honest though, G4 is still very rough to stay in, the 12 empowered champs and sheer number of 5 and 6 star blessings are rough. It doesn't mean you can't win, it just slows everything down by a lot. The sheer time it takes to cover defensive losses in G4 is prohibitive to do much more than move up for CvCs and fall back. More teams to gear and grow before my defense holds me at a number in G4.

I think I'm fairly close to sticking in the G3 space with a lot less effort - in terms of actual fights - because of putting time into improving my gear every week. 

Dropping back to G2 after CvC and then promoting back up to G3 right before CvC is actually a lot less work than trying to straight up stick in G3. The first week or two I was up there wasn't too bad, but as ascensions got rolling for other folks I started getting my ass kicked all over the place. 

Cleaning up my defensive teams is a whole other job, too. Though I think Pythion is gonna be what I need. :D