Board Thread:Episode Discussion/@comment-4010415-20170717151617/@comment-26018514-20170719173141

SpiritedDreaming wrote: Considering the gravity glyphs have always been used with Myrtenaster in hand(in fact, she's pretty conspicuously used Myrtenaster to make the black gravity glyphs and we know Gravity dust is a thing), it does seem likely that the extra effects are dust-based.

That being said, I doubt it's ice dust. Weiss has always used her Semblance with ice to shape it, and is extremely comfortable doing so. However, she struggles immensely with summoning. For someone so good at shaping ice dust with her Semblance, you'd think she wouldn't have so much trouble with summoning if it was just an application of ice dust to her Semblance.

Personally, I sorta think the summons are tied to steam if anything. They are hazy around the edges and waver like steam does. They appear in clouds of white, which could be either wind or steam. Winter doesn't summon in the fight against Qrow until after she's pulled her second sword out, which we have determined appears to have steam dust in it, and that's the one she stabs into the ground to summon, I believe.

So steam has much more likelihood of being the one tied to summoning than ice, if dust is indeed a requirement for it. but that isn't what I'm arguing for exactly..... to clarify;

Most Schnee semblance abilities seem to be keyed into or informed/altered by the dust used with them. Gravity/Time dilation being 2 we can almost certainly say are keyed to them.

Given this I see 2 possibilities for summoning;

1.  Ice dust based: Weiss has always idolised Winter and trys to imitate her by using Ice dust... but was never able to infuse it with her glyphs for Summons because she gave up after failing to summon time and again, so instead she focused on using Ice dust as much as possible(even creating psuedo sword Summons with just ice) and using her semblance, hoping Summoning would eventually come to her natural.

Now I don't see base Summoning as something that follows the normal pattern and thus am arguing that base Summoning does not use dust, instead;

2. Base summoning + Ice = this shimmering haze that multiple summons just materialize from... because in this case the Beowolves are NOT the summon, they are not the foe Winter struggled against, she instead struggled in an uncertain environment where the Beowolves appeared from seemingly no-where.

Winter is not Weiss, I don't think we should be assuming Winter in the past was still at the stage where she had "just" mastered standard Summoning, she instead indicates she thinks Weiss is way behind schedule with her Summons developement, so I would assume that this clip shows an advanced use of the skill she was just using for her own development and Weiss's combat training, instead of the fundamental summoning she used in Volume 3 for Weiss's benefit.