Is Bigger Actually Better?

So I’m technically on vacation for the next few weeks, but I want to discuss a recent trend in Games Workshop models that I brought up way back in my preview of the first wave of new Tomb Kings models; the trend of everyone getting a big centerpiece model.

Now I get that from a visual perspective it’s always kind of cool to have a big centerpiece model in your army, but from a game perspective I feel like they took away something unique to some of the armies. Now I’m approaching this mostly from the Fantasy side since there’s always been big models in 40k, and the biggest ones are usually covered by Forge World. In Fantasy there were always a big thing that armies could take, usually things like Dragons or Hydras or what-have-you, but now I feel that each army getting a huge model kind of takes away from the unique charm of things like the Lizardmen Stegadon which was a big imposing monster. Well if everyone has a big imposing monster then suddenly the Stegadon isn’t so unique.

It’s also the methodology behind them of “we’ll give every army a huge model, and we’ll make it so good in game that they’ll have to take it to be competitive and then we’ll charge $50+ for it” that bugs the hell out of me. It’s such a shameless money grab(which can also be said of the new “hordes are awesome” idea in Fantasy as well), but that still doesn’t bug me as much as the dilution of  the unique and awesome sight of a big monster in certain armies.

Maybe I’m looking at it wrong, but I liked it when seeing a big scary bad-ass monster was reserved to just a few armies, and now everyone has one which just sort of ruins the appeal to me. It was one of those things of going against certain armies that “oh man that big baddie could be in their list” was so much fun, and now it’s like that against every army. Storm of Magic didn’t help this much either since it was basically just full of big models that any army could take.

I like the charm of certain armies having big things while others need to find ways around it, and if the way around it now is to counter it with another big thing then it loses some of the charm and some of some of the uniqueness of the armies.

Just had to get that off my chest.