So I heard you want a new Dinosaur for free

[buffalozap]

Does Queen Nefer and the Cosmic Turtle cost reserve points to use the abilities on this picture? I added the snip from page 108 of the GHB for clarification.

[rokapoke]

"Each time a unit is added to an army during a battle, you must first subtract the number of points the unit would cost from your pool of reinforcement points."

Both abilities explicitly add a unit to your army, and therefore you must pay for the privilege. 

[Shaker1982]

If that's the case why would anyone keep points in reserve on the of chance that they roll a 14-17 with the cosmic engine or that Neferata may or may not slay a hero, they way I read it and always seen it played is that these are free models provided by an ability or circumstance NOT a direct attempt to bring on new models using summoning spells

can anyone clarify this?

[Squirrelmaster]

You are adding units to your army, so you must pay the points.

Yeah, it sucks and these abilities are almost unusable in matched play, but them's the rules. There's no exception made in the matched play rules for “but that makes this spell/ability basically worthless”.

FWIW you could of maybe set aside points, see if you get the these abilities off, and then if you don't, use some other summoning spell/ability instead.

Or if you're not too worried about competitive play, just house-rule out with your opponent beforehand.

[BaldoBeardo]

Sylvaneth got borked in a similar fashion, among others. It's the price you pay to get the medium between cool fluffy rules and any kind of balance structure for matched play.

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[Mc1gamer]

You pay, period.....in Matched Play. There's no way to get around it. If its a method to return a model to the table that died, or bring in a new model/unit that wasn't paid for (not talking about restoration/regeneration of models lost in an unit up to the max), its got to be paid for. No cute wording should get around this if you subscribe to the notion that Matched Play is about balancing the game. I can't stand the hypocrosiy I see from players who ridicule Open/Narrative and spew nonsense about people wanting free units but then also look to twist some wording to work in their favor to do the same (not saying anyone here is, but yes, I see this....ALOT). 

Look, Open is great and the scrolls were built for that form of play, but it had issues. Matched Play does too and I hope the next GHB addresses them since the first one was clearly rushed. Even so, Matched Play did make competitive play viable, as Open, especially the summoning mechanic, got out of hand. it is way to powerful. On the other side, Matched Play's restriction is too heavy handed and restrictive. The cost vs benefit is nearly never worth it. Sure, there are scenarios where it is, like dropping mid-late game a unit to steal an objective OR potentially getting a unit further downfield than they could move/run, but the hurdles to get there and ways to lose those reinforcement pts simply make the benefit not worth the risk. Much more often than not you are better off just deploying those pts. 

Cool and fluffy affects like Neferata turning a slain model into a Vamp Lord are completely lost, as is many other warscrolls with various abilities that require in Matched the reserve reinforcement pts in order to work. In Open/Narrative, they are cool, but just way to much in the current Matched Play system to be fair. 

My point is that the Open way doesn't fit into a competitive environment, and the current method in Matched takes a cool mechanic and makes it ineffective most of the time and a liability.  SO....my hope is that the next GHB finds some happy medium. it would be nice to see these various abilities (not all are spells afterall) be usable in Matched Play but with some method that allows them to be more balanced in the competitive arena. Not as wild west as Open, but less restrictive and detrimental as is currently works in Matched. I doubt we'll even then see one rule that affects both, but I'd like to see some adjustment that at least makes the Matched system a bit more workable.