40K Deep Thought: How to Build a Collection
So I’ve been thinking, in the new era of high costed wargaming products what is the best way to build up a miniatures collection?
I remember back in the old days things were very different for us wargamers. People who wanted to play Ultramarines, did. Blood Angels were Blood Angels, and Chaos was Chaos. You would occasionally see the oddball counts-as player but as often as not, it was just someone with a shoebox of random minis that he would try to use for whatever army he liked. ~We all shunned that guy…
Folks often had several armies and flocked from the latest thing to the latest thing, stuffing unfinished projects under beds for years at a time, only to be dredged up in the next edition.
Fast forward to now…
We see ever more costly startup costs for a “new from scratch” army and I’m seeing veterans and even newer players alike start to talk of adding units here and there to existing collections, instead of taking the plunge on new ones. Combine this with the discarding of the old school “your army must represent what it is painted as” rules that used to dominate the tournament circuit and we arrive at today’s topic.
How do you plan on building your collections from this point on?
There are several schools of thought out there:
1) Smaller list focused armies. You devour a codex, mathhammer it, build the most evil list you can, and purchase it and it alone, down to the last point. No waste. You better hope you planned it out right! On the plus side, you can collect more armies as each is so small and efficient.
2) Larger cross-codex collections. You pick an out of the way chapter scheme (Heresy Era, Relectors, etc…) and collect a large codex spanning set of models that you can use across a variety of rulesets as you see fit (works best with MEQs)
3) Larger single codex collections. You pick your poison well based on rules, models, or whatever and just keep adding and adding and adding. You eventually have almost infinite codex options, but have to live within the confines of your chosen race. Choose wisely…
~So I sit between #2 (my Death Guard army which I can play as SMs, CSMs, or CDs), and #3 with very large collections of about 4 other armies. Where do you sit and how do you see your collecting patterns changing in the new post price increases world?
