I went H1 (with the reclass limit still intact-first playthrough, also didn't understand why none of my units could visit villages until I tried it in chapter 3 with marth, so no malacia either :( ) with male mage MU, reclassed into cleric at level 10 ish. Went very well, actually.
I tend to favor mobility very highly and thus I made extensive use of caeda, catria and palla (I classed the latter into a dracoknight to have an axe user on the team, probably would have made luke or rody an axe user if I could have). Usually all 3 of them at once. Luke and Rody turned out to be solid cavaliers and Ryan in his default archer/sniper class was an absolute killing machine. Aside from that, basic usage of Merric and Linde as casters.
The one major thing that helped me in the latter half of the game however was reclassing ogma into a knight/general, and not overly using tiki (she is extremely fragile).