Ramos' "Summon the Swarm"

[Erik1978]

Hey there.

The (overly used) Ramos, has a summoning spell saying: "Choose to summon one, two, or three steam arachnids." (Then a wall of text)

Does this mean my opponent has to declare a number, and can then only summon the declared amount?

For instance if he says he wants to summon 2, then Soul Stones for a TOME and flips a red joker, he then summons 2 even though he could have summoned 3?

Similarly, if he wants to summon 2 but only flips a 7 of rams, he won't summon 1, he will just fail?

Or: Can he just flip a card, see what that amounts to and then put the number of arachnids on?

On another note, why are arachnids not peons? 3 arachnids every turn, with great speed, great Df/Wp, armor, unimpeeded etc. In other words the perfect scheme runners, not to mention flooding the table with way too effective and cheap spiders. With most schemes, these guys are 6 VP in the bag and more than a little nuisance for the opponent. If they get too wounded, they simply team up to make an arachnid swarm. Seems the best summoning mechanic in the game?

[Manxfaux]

I find pretty much all summoning is OP when compared to non-summoning, but I don't think steam arachnids are undercosted or OP in themselves, it is the delivery mechanism that makes them stronger, and that is somewhat mitigated by the slow/wounded/no interaction mechanics. If you made steam arachnids insignificant you'd have to do the same with any cheap model that has the potential to be summoned or otherwise moved large distances, and there are a lot!

Ramos' mechanic, while undoubtedly strong, has its flaws, from having to spend SS on a decent cache and a sacrificial construct, through having the right cards and not getting your electric creation lured across the board out of range and/or having its scrap moved/removed before it can be used.

With great luck Ramos can summon 3 spiders from one scrap per turn, sure, that is pretty damn good, but I played a game at the weekend where a Nico player got lucky and, despite black jokering his first summon (which would have crippled Ramos), over the course of THREE turns summoned 4 hanged (I managed to kill 2), a necropunk, a flesh contruct and a punk zombie (I lost count of the mindless zombies). All without slow and most of the hanged given fast. That's more than an entire crew's worth of SS in three turns. He had zero issues generating corpses nor keeping Nico and Mortimer going forward as well. Brutal it was.

I know anecdotes prove nothing but I can tell you I would have given a lot to see 9 arachnids being summoned across from me.

[Breng77]

I feel like the 2016 GG schemes have done a bit to balance summoning.  With hunting party being a suited scheme, schemes require certain models at the start of the game, and more kill schemes in general.  It is still powerful but has been a bit scaled back.