[Autumn]

I actually don't understand why this is really that big of an issue; you can already do what's proposed by OP and your active youkai is restrained by your base faith regardless.

The number of hard counter youkai is fairly small and with even eight slots you can keep a decent chunk of them if not all for hotswapping if you really wanted to. If there's anything that needs to be addressed, it should be the fact that these sync mind effects are strong enough to hard counter someone. But this isn't really the thread for that.

So I'm all for the suggestion, it's a nice quality of life that would make summoner more accessible; no need to gatekeep it behind arbitrary stat requirements.

I like to equate youkai slots to skill slots, the amount of active skills you can equip increases your versatility and flexibility in any given scenario, but you are not disabled from being smart and equipping only what you need if you anticipate needing it too. Though Skill Pool or "Available Skills", unlike Skill Slots or "Equipped skills", is limited to Skill Points. You are still only allowed a finite amount of these according to your skill point allocation.

I think the maximum amount of active contracts at any one point is pretty fair when tied to a stat requirement, every 5 FAI is just '1 youkai skill slot' in terms of equal amounts of power, at the current moment you are allowed a maximum number of 21 youkai slots on a 5 base FAI race and investing 80 FAI, though more normally people will arrive at 20 max youkai slots. (Vorso Versos also increase this amount but lets cross that out for a second)

While technically it is never possible to get every single youkai in the game anymore, it is so close to the truth we can ignore that little bit of inaccuracy here.

I think 20 maximum number of youkai slots would simulate the aforementioned skill pool, while active contracts being increased by FAI is preferable to skill slots (still being capped at 12)

This cap of 20 youkai would not be tied to FAI, I should note out, just in case it isn't clear I am agreeing.