Wyrd: Summoner Spam Gets Nerfed – and It’s a Great Thing
Summoners are getting some upgrades and changes in the next edition – including a change to calling for reinforcements that makes the game more fun for everyone. Take a look…
One of the most potent abilities a player can bring to a fight, and a cornerstone of Malifaux, is summoning. In past editions some of the best masters were able to summon new models. In the new edition summoning remains a powerful ability, but the power has been reigned in a little bit to keep summoners from walking away with a win too easily. Wyrd looked at the rules from a few angles while making changes.
Wyrd explains how summoning is going to work using Dashel Barker, the Guild’s newest Master, as an example…
There’s a lot of fun stuff on Dashel’s stat card, but for the purposes of this article, let’s focus on his Call In Reinforcements Action. The first thing that jumps out about the Action is that it’s Once per Turn, which is a restriction that can be found on every Master-level summoning Action.
Previously, in second edition, the best thing that a summoner could do was to spam their summoning Action as much as possible to flood the board with models. The rest of the summoner’s card was almost secondary to that action. Just about everyone has played a few games against Kirai and Nicodem where all they did was spam their summoning action to churn out as many new models as possible.
Surprisingly, most of our playtesters ended up enjoying the summoning Masters a lot more after this change. By removing the burden of having to create and maintain a summoning engine for maximum efficiency, it freed these Masters up to do other things with their Actions. Once Dashel has called in a new Guard, he’s free to move around or shoot at his enemies without feeling like he’s “wasting” those Actions.
While Dashel can only summon one model at a time (most likely due to Guild budget constraints), some of the other summoning Masters, such as Dreamer and Asami, can summon multiple models with a single Action. To do so, they just add the Cost of all of their summoned models together when determining the Action’s TN. This allows these Masters the option of summoning in two weak models in favor of a single stronger model.
Read about what else Master-level summoning can do here!
