Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

This came up in the Chaos tactica thread and I figured I'd get more opinions. The Banner of Blood stratagem allows you to spend 1CP before the battle begins to upgrade a daemonic icon to a Banner of Blood. The question is, can this be used on a bloodletter unit in your summoning pool which technically isn't a part of your army yet?

 barboggo wrote:
This came up in the Chaos tactica thread and I figured I'd get more opinions. The Banner of Blood stratagem allows you to spend 1CP before the battle begins to upgrade a daemonic icon to a Banner of Blood. The question is, can this be used on a bloodletter unit in your summoning pool which technically isn't a part of your army yet?

As you say, it's not part of your army yet so there is no model with Chaos Icon to upgrade.

i.e. No, you cannot use Banner of Blood on a summoned unit. There really is no reason to summon units, you're much better off spending the CP to deep strike them instead.

There is a common misunderstanding with summoning. A lot of people seem to think that when you set aside points at the beginning of the game this is when you choose the units to be summoned. That is not the case. Rather you set aside any number of points you wish and that is all you do until you make the summoning roll in game.

Once you've made the summoning roll, then you choose what to summon. It can be any Daemon unit provided you have enough points set aside remaining and the summoning character has the appropriate mark. This flexibility is really the only tangible benefits of summoning, and it's a marginal one still at best.

So as BCB says, the unit doesn't exist before the battle so you can't use the stratagem.

I'll also echo BCB in encouraging you to ignore summoning, take a cheap Battalion of Daemons, and use those CP on the deep strike stratagem instead. Way more reliable and you'll probably have CP to spare!

 barboggo wrote:
This came up in the Chaos tactica thread and I figured I'd get more opinions. The Banner of Blood stratagem allows you to spend 1CP before the battle begins to upgrade a daemonic icon to a Banner of Blood. The question is, can this be used on a bloodletter unit in your summoning pool which technically isn't a part of your army yet?

You don't have any units in a 'summoning pool' of specific units. You have reinforcement points that can be spent on any eligible unit based on the summoner's allegiance and the result of the summoning roll.

Fair enough. This arose from a nice post from that thread on how to make summoning work by bringing a large variety of models and then using the flexibility of summoned units to your advantage. Unfortunately without the banner it seems that khorne units are out of the question, which limits your "flexibility" to pinks horrors or plaguebearers. I could also maybe see a flex herald being useful if you had multiple bloodletter or pink horror bombs and not enough heralds to buff them all but that seems like a niche use case. Not looking great for summoning. Thanks for the responses guys.