Summoners comps are problematic and this is my suggestion on how to balance them.

Summoners, most often, flood the board with a huge number of units that take aggro, and take forever to kill, even with AoE. Even more problematic, the fact that summoned units stay indefinitely on the board until they're killed (except Zyra's plants and Azir's soldiers, which also are untargetable). So, even if you manage to kill all Summoners on the board, their minions can still lose you the round, even after fighting them for long.

Only Berserkers really can win against Summoner consistently enough. Every other comp struggles a lot.

Here is my suggestion on how to balance Summoners and tackle the " spammable summoning " aspect of it:

• During each round, increase their Max Mana by X value each time they summon units. This only lasts for each round separately and resets to normal Max Mana Values at the start of each round.

To illustrate what I mean, I'm gonna use as an example:

• His max mana is 125.
• If he summons units (1st spell cast), his max mana goes from 125 to 135 (+10).
• If he summons units again, his Max Man goes from 135 to 145 (+10).
• etc.
• At the start of the next round, his max mana return to 125.

The actual added amount to the max mana is, of course, debatable. I used " +10 " just as an example to illustrate my idea. It could be less or it could be more.

So, what does increasing the max mana values on Summoners do, in terms of balancing the trait itself?

1. It delays the next wave spawn by a bit, each time, giving the enemy a fair shot at actually clearing some of the summoned units, since most of them are permanent during the fight. Because, right now, Summoners invoke so many minions that it's almost impossible to clear most of them before the next wave arrive. It's like a boss rush, if you know what I mean...

2. It counters the fact that people usually build mana items on the most problematic Summoners, i.e. Zyra, Malzahar and Zed. This will keep this type of build in check and makes it more fair to play against and somehow manageable. Because, right now, If you face these units with Seraph's Embrace and/or Spear of Shojin, it just feels so hopeless and it's so unfairly frustrating to play against. Not to mention the fact that, unless you're playing a good Berserkers comp, you'll most likely lose to Summoners, late game, guaranteed.

3. It will soft nerf the most broken comp in the game: Shadow/Mage + Summoners. Not only the board becomes a swarm of minions (literally, there are more minions than champions on the board), but, on top of that, they can be summoned twice in a single cast (twice the nightmare) and/or have increased damage, as well (because, fuck you, I guess!). Of course, using my example, If Summoners invoke their minions twice due to Mage buff, they should get twice the Max Mana increase, as well (+20 for each cast buffed with Mage, in this case).

So, yeah... that's my suggestion.

Keep in mind that I'm not a game designer and, by no means, would I ever assume that I know better than the actual Devs. But, I think that the basic idea of how to balance Summoners, without really gutting them, is there. My reasoning might be flawed, sure, and I might've neglected something important that I missed. But, I believe this might be a start.

Afterall, I'm only writing this because I love TFT and I just wanna have a better gameplay experience in my games. And right now, Summoners are quite the problem, imho, and they take away a good portion of my fun.

Peace!