Summoners

## Overview

*Summon beings from beyond time and space and reach into the deepest depths of The Box to find the perfect card for the job! Assemble a team of powerful minions from other decks while you empower your own minions with spells and enchantments.*

Summoners directly access published decks which are not being played by any player in the game to summon Titans and Leaders ("king minions") to fight on their behalf. This faction requires tremendous card knowledge and is at high risk of analysis paralysis, but also provides an incredibly versatile toolkit to adapt to your situation.

Image Album: https://imgur.com/a/aLIGx0k

## Details

#### General

* Name: Summoners
* Author: ludichrisness
* Complexity: 5/5
* Version: 1.0
* Last updated: January 3, 2024

#### Mechanics

* Stasis
* Storing
* Titans
* Unowned Decks

## Cards

#### Breakdown

Summoners have the normal 10 minions and 10 actions. They have a total minion power of 32, or an average of 3.2 per minion. Among their actions, there are:

* 0 play-on-base actions
* 7 play-on-minion actions: Astral Burst, Conduit (2x), Dimension Slip, Rainbow Bridge, Soul Overflow, Spirit Guide
* 3 standard actions (one of which directly affects a minion, **in bold**): Incarnation (2x), **Overchannel**
* 1 action that directly increases a minion's power: Overchannel

#### Minions (10)

* **1x Thaumaturge (5)**: Talent: Play a titan here which no player owns; it does not count against your multiple titan limit. At the start of your turn or when it leaves play, place that titan in the box.
* **2x Eidolon (5)**: If you have at least two other minions here, draw two cards.
* **3x Invoker (3)**: Ongoing: At the start of your turn, you may return an action on one of your minions here to its owner's hand. Then, if there are no actions on this minion, you may play an action on it.
* **4x Caller (2)**: Search a deck which no player owns for a minion of power 5 or more and store it under this minion. Ongoing: After you play a minion here of power 5 or more, you may shuffle it into your deck and place this minion in the box to play the stored minion here.

#### Actions (10)

* **2x Conduit**: Play on a minion. Talent: Search your deck and/or discard pile for a Conduit and draw it OR move one of your cards from one base with a Conduit to another.
* **2x Incarnation**: Place three stasis counters on a minion of power 5 or more from your discard pile or off the top of your deck.
* **1x Astral Burst**: Play on a minion. Talent: Cancel the abilities of a card here until the start of your turn.
* **1x Dimension Slip**: Play on a minion. Talent: Until the start of your turn, this minion cannot be affected by other players' actions. If its base leaves play, destroy this action to move this minion to the base which replaces it.
* **1x Rainbow Bridge:** Play on a minion. Talent: Shuffle a minion from your discard pile into your deck OR play an extra minion here of power 2 or less.
* **1x Soul Overflow**: Play on a minion. Talent: Place a +1 power counter on this minion for each card in your hand above 10.
* **1x Spirit Guide**: Play on a minion. Draw a card. Ongoing: Your hand size is increased by 2.
* **1x Overchannel**: Place one of your cards in play in the box to give each of your minions at its base +2 power until the end of the turn.

#### Bases

* **(24) The Astral Plane (4 2 1)**: When a minion here would gain power until the start of end of a turn, it gains an equivalent number of power counters instead.
* **(20) The North Mountain (4 3 2)**: The winner here may place a minion into their hand from any discard pile or from those which have been placed in the box this game.

## Clarifications

* **Astral Burst:** You can cancel the ability of the base itself.
* **Caller:** After a minion you summon from another deck enters play from under Caller, it is considered to be owned by you for the remainder of the game. If Caller leaves play before playing its stored card, the stored minion goes back to the deck it came from (it is still eligible to summon later in the game).
* **Caller, Thaumaturge:** A card which "no player owns" means a card which is not from a deck being played, but instead from a **published** (non-custom) faction which is not being played this game. Cards placed back in the box during the current game cannot be accessed by these abilities. Caller may access the Monster deck if they want to play Knight of the Living Dead or Plutonium Dragon, but those minions would be played as uncontrolled monsters.
* **Conduit:** You can move minions or titans, but not actions (as actions are transferred, not moved).
* **Dimension Slip:** If the base is replaced by multiple bases (e.g. Island Chain), choose one base to move the minion to.
* **Thaumaturge:** Titans you play do not count against your multiple titan limit but they still cause clashes. If you try to play a second titan on the same base, you "clash" with yourself and need to choose one of the titans to leave play unless there is an effect like Kaiju Island.
* **The North Mountain**: This abilities triggers during the "when scoring" phase so the winner cannot claim one of the minions on this base as they have not been discarded yet.

## Strategy

### General

Summoners have a simple yet effective toolkit of their own, focusing on drawing cards and minion modifiers which provide a range of utility, including low powered plays, recursion, moving, and power. Their cards are generally a little below the baseline to make up for the incredible versatility of the Caller and Thaumaturge, who form the backbone of the faction.

[Notes on Caller]

[Notes on Thaumaturge]

### Partner Suggestions

As a support faction, Summoners can help with most partners by providing missing ingredients for them from other decks which they wouldn't be able to access otherwise. An action spamming faction like Musketeers would appreciate Supreme Intelligence or Odysseus, while a base modifier faction would want something like Sapa Inca. It can be overwhelming to consider the number of leaders available to Caller, but if you can manage the options then there is almost always something uniquely valuable for your partner which Summoners can provide.

#### Published

* **Ancient Egyptians:** Egyptians provide start of turn extra plays for Summoners which can speed them up a lot while obfuscating some abilities like Invoker. An uncovered Invoker can immediately play an action on itself, leading to a quick chain reaction. Uncovering a Caller can set up an immediate summon with an Eidolon from hand. Uncovering Incarnation can speed up its own summoning process by a turn as the stasis counter is immediately removed.
* **Fairies:** Many titans especially from 10th anniversary intriguingly have OR abilities which they never get to double because you can't have them out at the same time as the Spirit of the Forest. Picking Fairies as a partner provides a good amount of card draw to fuel your abilities, some minion modifier relocation to work with Invokers, and SOTF to provide additional benefits to your summoned creatures.
* **Rockstars:** A card like Soul Overflow has an uncapped potential but it can be hard for Summoners to make the most of it themselves. With the huge draw potential of Rockstars, you can build a giant hand from cards like Total Sellout, Classic Rocker, and The Monarch to generate massive power off Soul Overflow, before dumping all those cards in a Groupie burst to finish off the base.
* **Superheroes:** Superheroes are well equipped to defend Callers in the short term with their protection cards, as well as having more options to activate them with a 5 power minion played from hand. Their own native Titan provides you with valuable card draw or a localized Caller play, and their recursion and access to 5 power minions means that you'll be able to play your borrowed leaders multiple times over the course of a game.
* **Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas:** Summoners are in many ways a minion modifier faction, which often gets overshadowed by Caller and Thaumaturge. Instant recursion to many of those modifiers with cards like Winter Surprise can be quite impactful, and making Conduit mobile with Dr. Finkelstein can provide a huge amount of unpredictable movement and pivoting opportunities.
* **Werewolves:** The idea of having the Great Wolf Spirit out at the same time as other summoned titans is pretty terrifying. Not only do you get to double all of the other titan's talents but you also get to double Thaumaturge itself. You need some careful positioning with Conduit for this to work, but it's feasible to have three titans out on a single turn with this combo while being able to double the talents on all three of those titans.

#### Custom

* **Brewers:** Brewers can burn themselves out quickly over the course of a game, but this becomes a lot less worrisome when you can bring new replacement minions into your deck. As Brewers thin their deck out, you have the opportunity to recur some very powerful summoned minions into it, for a constant barrage of upper tier minions. Callers and Titans boxing themselves from play is ideal to power up many Brewer cards, and Overchannel is perfect to pair with their Taste Tester.

## Author Notes

Summoners may be the craziest concept I've ever tried to do with a custom faction, with directly accessing all 100+ decks that aren't being played. It was an incredibly challenging idea from a balance perspective, as well as from the perspective of figuring out what the rest of the deck should be doing. Getting the entry criteria for the summoned leaders right was crucial, and it went through several iterations before I settled on the final version which requires two specific types of minions on the same base as well as a permanent sacrifice of one of them. I liked the idea of the Eidolons as a blank slate creature which the Callers can mold into a desired form, as well as Callers needing to plan ahead and (publically) pick the minion they are going to summon. It's hard for Summoners to play both ingredients on the same turn, so there is often a window of opportunity for other players to disrupt the summoning ritual. An interesting phenomenon is that the more powerful the summoned minion, the more aggro it draws from other players, meaning that you may not always want to summon the strongest minion for your situation if the other player has the potential to burst you off the board before you complete the summoning. Summoners are an incredibly fun and AP-inducing faction which would never ever be made in the real game, but which have a special place in my heart. I hope you enjoy them!