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 RuneGrey wrote:

Lord Kragan wrote:
Pretty much: the basic idea is that you're sacrfying points in order to get whatever you want later on and in place. They also are able to make charges after being summoned so this ability is very useful for those units that can be best described as glass.cannons.

The downside in AoS is that you must place newly summoned units (or ones that are deployed outside the battlefield and are dropping, arriving from the side, or rising from below) more than 9" away from the enemy, leaving charges upon summoning as long shots at best. I don't believe there's anything that negates that 9" for summoning, although Stormcast and Skaven have rules or formations that allow them to drop in closer..

The other thing is that the more powerful the unit you want to summon, the higher the difficulty required. Summon Bloodthirster is on something fairly high - a 9 or a 10 IIRC - and I've seen a game or two go by where someone reserved the points to summon one and never got it off.

Yes and no. There's a couple ways to circumvent this issue. First that comes to my mind is sylvaneth. Plunk a unit of whatever you want in a wyldwood, cast the spell that lets you move wyldwoods 2d6. Voila.
Also Morghast archai can charge 3d6 dice and ardboyz that come to the table as per the ardfist rules (read: you plunk them on the backfield) can be targetted by Gordrakk's skill to charge 3d6 and so on. I'm pretty sure there's a couple more ways to deal with the 9'' issue.
And it should be rightfully so that there's more difficulty involved in summoning a big critter rather than a small one. if you fear missing that summon roll, just shell 20 or so points for a couple of chaos familiars.