Summoning Stone

Summoning Stone is a rare neutral minion card, from the League of Explorers set.

Strategy
Works well with Conceal as the spell protects the minion for a turn while giving you a 1 drop to use. Next turn you'll have 7 (or more) mana to benefit from Summoning Stone's effect.

Alternatively, any Mage deck can benefit from this card by playing it on turn 8 and immediately following it with Frost Nova to freeze the enemy board. Though the opponent might be able to remove the Summoning Stone with spells or Charge minions, usually they will not have the cards for this and you can flood the board while casting spells on the next turn.

Meat Wagon is especially useful when combined with Summoning Stone, as the Summoning Stone has zero attack, allowing Meat Wagon to pull it.

Lore
In World of Warcraft s (also known as Meeting Stones) are placed outside s and s to let adventurers (players) summon their friends to the instance, in order to do battle there together. It takes 2 people to summon others with a Summoning Stone.

Prior to the advent of the system, Summoning Stones were instrumental in allowing players to form groups to tackle instanced content. Players could communicate globally in the /LFG channel, but travelling to the instance in question could take a long time, especially if the player was on another continent. Usually the two closest players would travel to the instance, where they would channel the Summoning Stone's effect to teleport the other group members to the location one by one.

Because of this functionality, and due especially to the long delays that were often involved in finding a full group, and waiting for invitees to sell junk, repair armor, purchase supplies and otherwise prepare to be summoned, players would often spend quite a while waiting around or near Summoning Stones. As such, they were often hotspots for. When players from one faction approached a Stone to summon their allies, they would often find players of the other faction already there, and fighting would ensue. This was exacerbated by the fact that the Stones are usually placed close to the entrance to the instance, meaning players leaving the instance would also travel past the Stone on their way back out, leading to even greater traffic and thus greater potential for conflict.

With the Dungeon Finder system offering a far more convenient way of finding groups, few players now bother to use the Summoning Stones, although they remain in place. They can still be useful for players seeking to tackle older content, which is not included in the Dungeon Finder system.

Trivia

 * This card was made due to the popularity of the The Great Summoner Competition Tavern Brawl.
 * This was originally a shaman card, and then a mage card, since the developers weren't sure they wanted it to be neutral. However, at least partly as a result of dangerous interactions between Master of Disguise and the then neutral Animated Armor, the two cards were swapped, with Summoning Stone becoming neutral.

Fixed bugs

 * At least in Patch 5.2.2.13807, if you played Cho'gall before playing a spell, Summoning Stone will summon a 0-Cost minion, since the spell cost Health and not mana. This has been later fixed, and now Summoning Stone correctly summons a minion matching the final mana cost of the triggering spell.
 * If you played Preparation, Summoning Stone then played a spell, you paid the Preparation-discounted cost but Summoning Stone summoned a minion according to the undiscounted cost. (Gazlowe also used the undiscounted cost to decide whether to trigger or not.) This bug was fixed in Patch 5.0.0.12574 (WotOG patch).

Patch changes

 * Added.