AoS: Summoning Gets A Makeover
Age of Sigmar takes a major swipe at summoning units to the tabletop. Get ready to bring in the back-up in new and exciting ways – for FREE!
Summoning units has always been a tricky thing to balance. How do you properly represent the concept of bringing in outside support to the game but still keep it balanced from a points side of things? Do you make the units that can summon other units cost even more? Do you charge for the units coming in? It’s never quite felt perfect. With that said, Games Workshop is taking another stab at summoning in AoS 2.0!
Rather than summoning units through magical spells, every army that could summon units before now has a unique resource that allows them to bring fresh reinforcements onto the tabletop that fits with their army’s background – if you’ve got the Maggotkin of Nurgle or Legions of Nagash, you’ll have played with rules like this already.
This first concept is a great nod to the thematic part of the game. Bringing in a pack of Bloodletters should require different things than raising some skeletons. This change will help the game feel more cinematic but it also causes players who want to summon to really push for those army unique requirements. That means different factions will have different goal – shocking I know!
Two examples they list are Hosts of Slaanesh and Seraphon. Slaanesh feeds on suffering and pain, so their resource generation revolves around their Heroes dealing or receiving wounds that don’t slay targets. Seraphon gain their resource by performing rituals. Both are different and thematic!
Summoning Goes Free
The BIGGEST change for Matched Play is the fact that summoning will no longer cost reinforcement points. That means you won’t need to leave points off the table and when you build a 2k list, you can bring a FULL 2k points to the board. This should keep things really interesting for those armies as now they are at full fighting strength and have alternate ways to generate those summoning resources.
Summon units by bloodshed? We can get behind that!
If you’ve got a recent Battletome, you might see some hints of these abilities already in your book. For folks who don’t have a book, they will be getting those resources and rules in the Generals Handbook 2018 later this year.
These new changes sound pretty solid. They are thematic and no longer punish players for wanting to keep some reserves off table for the (sometimes slim) chance to bring them on the table. Personally, I never liked how iffy summoning could be – are you going to roll high enough to get a Bloodthrister or are you just bringing in a handful of Bloodletters. You could end-up with a ton of points sunken off the table. That led to most Match Play games avoiding summoning altogether. But now, we might see summoning become a viable strategy without it becoming as silly as it was in previous versions.
What do you think of these summoning changes? Let us know in the comments below!
