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New to AoS so bear with me. A chaos sorcerer lord or other wizard with a summoning ability can cast x number of spells per turn. On say a Bloodthirster scroll it says "Chaos Wizards know the summon BT spell in addition to any others they know." Then has the casting info and whatnot.

My question is, does the said unit attempting to be summoned have to be in "reserve" somewhere and be part of the army at start? Or could I literally summon any unit that has the "A chaos wizard can summon XYZ..." on it's scroll, weather it is in my initial army at start or not?

Not that I would, but I could technically just attempt to summon units each turn instead of casting buffs or shadow bolts or whatnot?

Thanks for the info in advance.

There are 3 ways to play Age of Sigmar; Open, Narrative and Matched. Matched play is the tournament standard, the most popular and the most akin to other editions of Warhammer so I'll start with that.

Matched: look at page 108 of the GHB for a full explanation. To be able to summon new units you need to set aside points as "reinforcement points". For example in a 2000 point game you could choose to have 1500 points of units selected normally and 500 points set aside as reinforcement points.

When you set aside points for reinforcements you do not have to declare what you will be using those points for, you decide that mid-game which makes it a great utility mechanic. For example your Chaos Wizards could try and summon a Bloodthirster or they could try and summon some Bloodletters depending on what you need. For each successful summon you deduct the models points cost from your Reinforcement Points.

You do not need to have the model in play already for wizards to know the spell on the warscroll. For example you can summon a Bloodthirster without needing to already have a Bloodthirster on the battlefield (this is addressed in an FAQ).

Open and Narrative: For open and narrative play, there is no limitation on summoning. But it is important to remember that both game modes aren't designed for cutthroat play. I don't particularly play either game mode now, but back before the GHB (when these two modes were default) the most important thing in my opinion was to declare what you will try and summon. This is because the games have no points values and so players try to balance the forces themselves. In the middle of battle of you suddenly summon a Bloodthirster that you opponent wasn't expecting it can throw the balance off and create and bad experience for both players. If it is for narrative play you should weave it into the narrative, ("my wizard has a powerful talisman with a Bloodthirster bound to it, he will try to summon it into this realm during the battle so be prepared!"). If it's open play you might just want to tell your opponent so they can choose something similar to go into summoning reserves or to have a few more models on the board in anticipation for it.

Excellent. thanks for the reply. I'll give page 108 a read in the morning. We have played a few open play matches but are switching to matched points this weekend. Understood about it being a "points pool" if you will that anything can be cast from as long as,
A: There are enough points in the pool to pay for the unit, and
B: It is a summonable unit as per it's scroll.

I look forward to implementing this into gameplay and again, thanks for the clarification.

Happy to help, summoning is a really useful tactic in Matched Play for how adaptable your army becomes, it's also needed to get powerful items like Balewind Vortexes in your army. It's always great to hear people use summoning to good effect as it often gets dismissed by the player base. If you have success with it you should post it on Dakkadakka as a good insight :-)