How does summoning works?

[Chrypffs]

Greetings!

Hope you are all well!

Please pardon my ignorance and stupidity, as i am a complete newbie to Malifaux!  Unfortunately, I have become addicted!  …and as a newbie, I decided to choose the absolute simplest master available, so I chose Yan Lo (as a Resser)!!  HAHA!!  I know, but he’s very cool!!  I just need to figure him I’m out and I figured if i could figure him out the others wouldn’t be so daunting!  Anyway, I have several models in my crew that can summon (i.e., Toshiro The Daimyo can summon Ashigaru, Carrion Emissary can summon mindless zombies, etc.), but I’m unclear on exactly how summoning works.  When these models summon, are the models they summon free or can they only summon models that I previously hired during start up?  This is confusing because if my Ashigaru are already hired as “minions”, why would Toshiro need to summon them?  They are already on the board once.  Similarly, with mindless zombies...  If I already have my mindless zombies on the board as minions, how do I summon more using a corpse marker if they are all already in play?  Obviously, I am missing a dynamic somewhere, so any insight, information, or wisdom would be very much appreciated and most helpful!!  I look forward to your thoughts!

THANK YOU!!!

Chrypffs   

[TheUnseemlyOne]

You don’t have to summon models that you’ve hired.

So in the case of Ashigaru, you can summon them even if they weren’t in your starting crew. Because they are Minion (3) you can have 3 of them in play at a time.  So you could hire 1 and summon 2, hire 3 and summon one after one of them dies, or hire none and summon up to 3. 

[Chrypffs]

Excellent! Thank you!!

[Morgan Vening]

On 10/8/2022 at 1:01 PM, TheUnseemlyOne said:

You don’t have to summon models that you’ve hired.

So in the case of Ashigaru, you can summon them even if they weren’t in your starting crew. Because they are Minion (3) you can have 3 of them in play at a time.  So you could hire 1 and summon 2, hire 3 and summon one after one of them dies, or hire none and summon up to 3. 

Yep. They're basically "free" in the sense you don't have to hire them.

There's usually a cost somewhere, often an action needs to be spent, a card played (either a "discard to", but more often you just need to spend one to hit the target number and suit), and/or a resource used (soulstones, corpse/scrap markers, etc).

And even if that looks like a great deal, there's usually a down side. A lot of summons come in with a penalty on their Summon Upgrades (Slow is most common, but lower health, or other penalties are common). And that's not even accounting for their lower ability to directly affect Schemes and Strategies (which is the determinative factor in winning).

It still has uses though. But it's not necessarily as obviously powerful as it first seems. Lost more than one game because I spent too much time making my crew larger, and not enough actually winning the game.

[Ozzac]

22 hours ago, Morgan Vening said:

And even if that looks like a great deal, there's usually a down side. A lot of summons come in with a penalty on their Summon Upgrades (Slow is most common, but lower health, or other penalties are common). And that's not even accounting for their lower ability to directly affect Schemes and Strategies (which is the determinative factor in winning).

Regarding their lower ability to interact with strategy/schemes I usually use them to annoy or tie up my opponent, stopping them from making points while my other models do their things.

Unless I'm playing kirai or asami, in which case I usually spam goryos or obsidian onis where enemy models are thicker to use as suicide bombers.