Ice Golems.

In the world at large, golemancer's and their magics are respected, but sit low on the totem pole of arcane practices. Mundane folk regard them with as much awe as any other magic user, but actual Practitioner's look upon them as skilled craftsman, no more special than a masterful black smith or leatherworker.

There's a hierarchy within the practice itself as well. The hardness of a material reflects the difficulty of making a golem from it and the strength of the finished product, so naturally Golemancers who work with diamond are most highly regarded with workers of ruby and sapphire not far behind. Common stones lie in the middle, followed by the weaker gold and silver of coin and jewelry, and pitiable ice golems bring up the rear garnering as much respect as they have strength.

Yes, the soft bodied golemancers of the Southern territories look down on their Northern brethren with contempt for our soft, brittle works, but the North doesn't mind. Proud Northerners live hard, brutal lives fighting to survive the arctic conditions - we don't have the time or the resources to go trekking hundreds of miles away to diamond mines and waiting weeks or months while hired labor mines that precious gem. We're fighting for our lives today, right now - and that's when our golems must be made.

In the Southern territories, an ice golem is weak - almost as low down on the hardness scale as material can get at a measly 1.5 Mohs. But in the Northern wastes, with a howling winds and temperatures hitting 30 or 40 below freezing? Ice golems have a greater strength in those hateful temperatures, reaching a hardness of 6 Mohs. Still not nearly as strong as a diamond golem, but any Northerner worth his salt could build you an army of ice golems before a Southerner had even travelled to the mine or quarry where his work would start. We've got front yards, backyards, house roofs and country roads just filled with snow - build you a quick snowman, sprinkle some water, make a little token offering to Jack Frost, Lord of the Dead and Frozen and you're in business.

Of course, there's other ways you can go about working up an ice golem if you don't truck with Jack Frost. Kill a fearsome beast of ice and snow and put it's still beating heart inside the chest of an ice man. Craft a body made of ice and snow with all the skill of a proper artisan and animate it. Enchant a piece of clothing - or more likely steal one that's already been enchanted - and gift it to your ice golem.

No need to go through all that trouble though, not in the North where Jack Frost is King. He loves his troubled sons and he doesn't think a thing of standing up armies of ice and snow for them.