The game is in a reasonable place but not perfect after the release of GG1. I have played around 400 games since 3rd edition came out and have played in multiple tournaments, leagues, and international leagues. There are certain problems with the game I have noticed over time with particular crews and mechanics. I will propose fixes with the goal of trying to keep the crews as close to their initial design as possible.
Summoning and why its broken
1. Each model you summon puts you ahead in SS. You are effectively starting with +27 SS if you summon a 9SS model for the first 3 turns.
2. Most summons don’t have any real downsides. Slow or a low amount of damage the turn it comes in is not enough to curb how effective a summoned model is over the rest of the game
3. Anti summon tech is really bad. Excorcism requires a high crow in hand(or the summon doesn’t have an upgrade?) and most of the auras don’t matter because you can summon outside of them or just take the 2dmg hit. The only models that are effective against summons is vincent as he can stone for crows and Anna/Erik as they have gravity well, preventing the summon from being placed in their aura.
4. The game is 5 turns without scoring on T1. Its plenty of time to out attrition your opponent and score the objectives. No downside to summoning T1 as there’s no scoring.
5. Every action your opponent spends to deal with or work around a summoned model is a net positive for the summoner. Despite not being able to interact the turn they come in, they still stop your opponent from interacting by engaging their models. It’s like they also give slow to your opponent’s models.
6. The more expensive the summon model, the higher impact their actions have. A lot of summons are full models you can take normally and don’t seem to be balanced around being near free and in a great impactful position when summoned.
Summoners in Tournament Play: The main reason you don’t see summoners dominating tournaments is the time constraints on tournament games(2-2.5 hours). Because of the increasing amount of activations and the complexity of some of the summoning masters it takes both players more time to play through a turn (especially when the opponent doesn’t know what the crew does). In reality your only likely to barely finish turn 3 of a game when time is called during a tournament, which takes away the summoner’s main advantage of attrition. When playing competitive league games it generally takes at least 3 hours to play through a game with a summoner if the game is close.
HIGH LEVEL FIXES TO SUMMONERS
For main action summoners it would be ideal to create heavy restrictions on their summoning. A blanket change that would work is to change their attached upgrades to limit(1) so they can only have one summon out at a time. Then buff the master’s other actions to be more impactful like a normal master. Some summoners would need specific changes (like somer) to work with his abilities. Some summoner crews will need changes to models to make them worth hiring. For now we are focused on how they operate in the game. Even with a limit to their summons, they are still getting a lot of benefits from just one summon. Your opponent knows that if they kill it, your going to just summon another model so it really discourages attacking them. The major downside to doing this change is that you have to go through and change every summoning crew and create card bloat to handle the new changes.
An alternate way to nerf summoners would be to make anti-summon abilities actually good and put them on more models. Models like Excorcists should just have the built in crows on their attack to auto kill a summon if it hits. Otherworldly barrier should be a threatening aura that really makes your opponent consider if they want summons anywhere near that model.
A clean solution would be a generic upgrade that attaches to each summon which causes it to make a tn9 test or die at the end of its activation. This cleans up summons in multiple ways, if a summoner really wants to keep their summons their hand will be taxed fairly heavily. Summons are much more temporary but they still get to have an impact on the board and you don’t have to heavily adjust many of the crews to account for the mechanic.
Here is my initial proposed changes to the crews/mechanics: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1henecEH95JjETX0bm3DWcyNVsE30CSUPzQlkGisyNig/edit?usp=sharing