Clan's Cynic

I don't care for the celebrity worship of Cavil. That is all.

Neat article about someone's grimdark Cities project.

It's literally an existing axe bit on the Hearthkyn kit. Between this and the already shared Votann shotgun RE I think they've just given up at this point.

I got excited it was for a new boxset, but then saw Boxing Day Minatare. But that's definitely a great sign we'll see more FEC stuff with their Battletome. I hope.

In the mean time, you can always pretend the latest Diablo 4 trailer is a Dawnbringer Crusade with plenty of Vindicators.

To be fair it's easy to sell out when you apparently produce 5 copies of each book.

I'm still betting on Spring. I doubt they'd want to release arguably the most anticipated AoS army update in the middle of everybody buying 40k 10th and the new Space Marine wave.

Another Metawatch.

You've clearly never been to an AoS or 40k tournament either then. Tell us how much lunch money the evil WHFB players beat you up for. Except 40k's sales were shrinking at the time as well due to mismanagement. It's no secret their profit was falling year by year on all fronts under Kirby's later reign. Imagine if the only releases AoS had this year were the Sylvaneth and Nighthaunt waves. No other Battletomes, no other models. Do you think AoS would be doing as well? That's what it was like with WHFB. Hell, this thread is a testament to that with the dramatically slowed down releases impacting on their community. The End Times stuff sold out pretty much immediately, which was very rare for a GW product back then. There was clearly an appetite for new stuff - a lesson GW seemed to learn with how the rapid releases occurred for 40k and AoS not long after WHFB died - but if your army only sees a model wave every decade or so... people are going to run out of things to buy. GW only have themselves to blame for WHFB's flagging sales. But with The Old World coming back they seemed to have realised this.

Continuing with the Goblin theme, apparently. Nobbla Blackwart for Blood Bowl.

Looncourt next week, as predicted. Also another Rivals Deck for Underworlds.

Not mentioned on stream, but Skarsnik (and the Macharian Crusade P1) were the Reader's Choice winners. Can't remember if that had been announced previously.

More Gotrek and another Vampire novel.

Releasing at the BL Celebration. Worth noting that Andy Clark wrote Gloomspite.

Miniature Of The Year voting. Obviously the Avatar is going to win, but maybe Brodd can beat out the Daemon Prince for place.

I don't think risk of alienating people has ever stopped GW before. Don't forget there's a decent sized number of people with old Wood Elf collections or who just bought Wanderer stuff for CoS too.

The least believable part of those rumours is GW not squatting the remaining High Elf stuff (Phoenix Temple). I'm not saying the person isn't reliable, I'm just genuinely surprised.

My money on the 'Dark Elf' symbol is still Scourge Privateers.

There's a Grand Tournament, Youngbloods, Casual and Doubles tournaments on.

List-builder app for War Cry.

I hate how the word 'entitled' has become this dismissive buzzword people throw out when they want to imply something negative about people merely stating they'd like to see something. Thanks BioWare. Anyway, the lack of visual diversity is something that's regularly brought up with regards to why people don't collect Fyreslayers. It's a lot like the Sisters of Battle were prior to their revamp - a lot of people liked the lore, they wanted to collect an army of them, but it had been about 15 years since Codex: Witch Hunters and the model line hadn't seen any additions, but what models they did have were extremely expensive. This meant you were collecting an army that was not only expensive, but also very samey, a double-whammy. Then the SoB revamp did finally arrive and it's fair to say their popularity probably skyrocketed about 1000% at least. The oft touted reaction to anything GW does is, "they're a business, they exist to make money" and it's no secret that 1) the lack of visual difference between FS units, 2) the lack of actual units and 3) the expense of the army are why people shy away from them. If GW want to make more money off Fyreslayers the obvious solution is to give them more options which are visually distinct. Ironjawz are an interesting contrast to this, because they released about the same time and have a similarly somewhat limited range of the models. But why is it Ironjaws were a lot more popular even before Warclans? Because despite sharing the same general designs, there's a very clear distinction between the units; there's the Black Orc grunts, there's the Big Ironjawz, there's the Ironjawz Riding Boars, the Heroes are all distinct, there's a giant centrepiece. By contrast, the Fyreslayers have... Naked Dwarf Dude, Heroes which are Naked Dwarf Dude (with a axe or staff), and a centrepiece which is shared between 3 different Heroes. It's well known Fyreslayers are the least popular AoS army. With that also comes some nervousness about what that lack of popularity means for the range. Remember this is an army which released months after GW took Fantasy out back and blew it's brains out, created at a time when they weren't shy of squatting (heh) whole armies they'd initially carried over. I suspect a lot of the demand for new Fyreslayer models is as much about hoping to feel relief that "oh good, new models means we're not going to get squatted" as it is just wanting them to paint. You see this with Wanderers/Dispossessed players with regards to the new CoS Battletome too.

The argument I always saw people make against USRs was they didn't like flicking through the Big Rulebook and they preferred every unit having all it's rules on the Datasheet/Warscroll. To that I would say... have USRs, but just have them written on the Datasheet/Warscroll as the special rules are now, alongside the actual, unique-to-that-unit ones. How many variations of Feel No Pain slightly changed/reworded do we have now, for instance?

Just going to pull the pin on a grenade and say that Double Turn is still a massive accessibility issue for a lot of people I've spoken to who sometimes show interest in AoS. As soon as it's raised or remembered, you can practically see the colour drain from their faces. I know a lot of people here will offer unlimited arguments as to why they think DT is a good thing, but try summing that up to the very large number of people who immediately see it as a negative. "It's not as bad as you think!" isn't really selling it. I don't think it helps that the lines between 40k/AoS as a ruleset have otherwise blurred quite a lot over the years, which offers less incentive for people who want to try something 'different'. *Throws grenade* Plus this year a lot of the hype has been around Horus Heresy, which is in the same, familiar setting of 40k (SPACE MARINES!!!) but is a very different ruleset with a new, competitively priced boxset (which isn't FOMO). I think a lot of people who would otherwise swap to AoS are playing that instead.

I was musing that one thing Horus Heresy has 40k and AoS beaten on is the Exemplary Battle articles. For those who don't pay much attention, every few months they put out a free PDF with some lore about a particular battle (or a snapshot of one) and at the end there's 1-2 new units added, as well as a bit of a showcase of ways the studio members converted said units out of existing GW/FW bits (usually they get two different examples). I don't ever see it happening, but I do wish AoS had something like that. Sure you can homebrew but there's something to be said for being able to take these to "Nothing unofficial allowed!!!" events and being encouraged to 'make' the unit yourself by converting or slapping together bits.