Warhammer 40K: Kill Team Starter Set Pricing Breakdown
There’s a new Kill Team Starter Set coming with some hard to get miniatures. Is it worth the price? Let’s do some math to find out!
The short answer is yes. This new Kill Team Starter Set is a good deal — if you want to get into Kill Team or even if you just want to collect these miniatures. But why? That’s what we’re going to chat about today. I’ve got the math to back it up, too.
Kill Team Starter Set – $112
- 7x Space Marine Heroes
- 7x Plague Marine Heroes
- 64-page starter handbook
- Core Token Sheet
- 2x Reference Sheets
- 10x dice
- Double-sided game board
- New MDF Terrain set (2x large structures, 8x smaller structures)
Now, if you notice above, I haven’t included any pricing breakdowns for the contents. Why? Because this is where things get a little fuzzy. Let’s start with the Space Marine Heroes costs.
So these are a little hard to price for a couple of reasons. They came in a blind box set of 8. You had to get them from retail stores and there really was no way to make sure you didn’t get doubles — you had to “blind buy” them and they came in display of 8. The only way to ensure you got 1 of each was to buy an entire display. The displays were priced at $64 for all 8…but that’s if your store was selling them for $8 each.
It’s almost impossible to gauge what the cost would be for these same miniatures now when you take into the very wide range of the second or third-hand market. And buying the respective boxes to rebuild these squads would also shoot your price way up, too. The Space Marine Heroes Series have three Intercessors, an Assault Intercessor, a Heavy Intercessor, an Eliminator, and a Captain. That’s a lot of boxes you have to buy to rebuild a squad of 7 miniatures.
Additionally, those blind boxes are no longer available (unless your store still has some back stock). You can still find them from resell sites (ie, eBay) for a significant mark-up. It’s the same issue for the Plague Marines, too.
Would it be better to price these as combat squads plus a character? Even that is skewed. Half of a Primaris Squad still wouldn’t get you all these options. And a squad of Plague Marines comes in a pack of 7 for $60. But that doesn’t include the same style Icon Bearer or the Sorcerer either.
If we were to just lowball this price, I’d say that $64 per set is a close as we’re going to get. That’s the cost of one of the displays. It’s also about the cost of a box of the “normal” squads. But even that is misleading because there are character equivalents inside each set. And those can go for $40+ these days.
The Kill Team Extras
Next up we have the new MDF terrain, too. This is the first set of MDF terrain from GW and pricing this relative to GW pricing is also super tough. Will this be the same pricing as other plastic terrain kits? Will it be more expensive because it’s pre-painted? Or less because it’s MDF? There’s no other GW product like it so that’s really hard to gauge.
As far as the other stuff in the box you need to actually play Kill Team that also has a value but it’s hard to gauge, too. GW sells dice but these are the basic white dice with black pips and not army specific dice. And the tokens and other stuff is just part of the boxed set.
So What’s The Breakdown
That said, if I had to price things out on the conservative end this is what I’d peg things at:
- 7x Space Marine Heroes – $64
- 7x Plague Marine Heroes $64
- Dice, tokens, board, etc – $15
- New MDF Terrain set (2x large structures, 8x smaller structures) – $20
My estimated price would bring this total to $163. The box is selling for $112. That means you’ve got an estimated savings of $51. But again, and I can’t stress this enough, these two Kill Teams included have such a weird/skewed price point that this is a low-ball estimate. Then again, maybe that’s going to be more accurate for them now that you can actually collect the miniatures from this box.
The Space Marine Heroes Series are back and they really mess with the math…
