We had another character retire, this one, so it’s time to do a bit of a write-up on it. The Summoner was not a character that I played, but an interesting character that a friend played, however, it didn’t seem like the easiest character to play.

You can probably guess what the Summoner does, it summons things. Now, that in itself is pretty cool, you get to control a lot of creatures and your cards either summon creatures or you can make them do things. However, it really seemed like it’s a bit tricky and a bit focused. The issue with it, is that until you’re at higher levels, you basically summon small creatures that might get off one round of attacks and then die. So if you don’t set it up correctly, you’re going to have a lot of time where you aren’t as powerful. It helps that summoning creatures though gives you XP.

Some of the reason, though, it might have been tricky at the start is that we had the Sawbones and Quartermaster starting at the same time. So we didn’t have a strong character that was really a tank yet. At the end, some of the animals that were able to be summoned could tank a little bit, but not that much. It did however, save us several times being able to swarm an enemy or having meat shields that protected us from enemy attacks. Again, they tended to be one hit and done, sometimes two hits and done, but soaking up a large attack really helped us stay alive longer.

Once you kind of figure out the strategy for the deck and get some of the stronger summons, it is interesting. You get summons with ranged attacks and summons with pierce. This made those summons very effective at higher levels when monsters might not have many more hit points but they have shields. They really do offer a nice utility, and if you are facing off against weaker monsters, you can sometimes just send a couple of summons off in their own direction, as long as there isn’t a door for them to open.

Overall, I think that this character is fairly complex, not because of complexity of actions, but because of the amount of management that you need to do for this character. And the fact that your summoner needs to be in the mix with their summons to give them additional actions makes it good that the character isn’t too squishy. There’s also the aspect of balancing out the use of cards, because when a summons dies, it burns the card. If you aren’t careful you can run through cards too quickly.

I’m ready personally to play not a support character, and while the summoner definitely is more combat focused, through the summons than a lot of characters, it does still have that feel that it doesn’t do too much for itself. I think if you’re someone who likes battlefield strategy and tactics, it’s going to be a strong character for you to play. You definitely can set-up what happens on the battlefield with where you place your summons and who you have them attack.

Complexity: Medium
Combat: Medium
Support: Medium

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