controlling conjured creatures

We just started a 5e campaign and I am going to be a conjurer. In 5e, at higher levels there seems to be a tremendous number of creatures you can conjure at once. Does anyone know if I can place and control those tokens myself? If so, how can I do this? I was planning to eventually have 12-18 conjured mephits at one time, and think it would be too cumbersome for the GM to control them, and run the game... Thanks for the help!

only the GM can generate creatures without an API script, he or she can give you control once they are on the table.

While i believe it's technically a low-priority bug(players able to make tokens probably isn't intentional); you can change your character sheet's portrait to that of your preferred summons. Once you've finished editing your sheet, you can drag the portrait onto the map yourself. You'll probably have a mess of macros/abilities without them being their own characters. A little more work up-front for the GM... They could create a rollable table and assign it tokens for whatever you might summon. They could then give you control of it and assign it to a sheet (I think), allowing you to create token actions for the table as a whole.