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If you fell into this clickbait, that's on you. The rest of us are subscribed to this blog as a newsletter. What are we, savages? Anyway, let's talk about collecting Oldhammer miniatures.

Pros and cons of collecting old models.

First of all, let me reflect on this pill too hard to swallow: The Games Corporation has swollen its prices so much that now there's virtually no difference between buying scarce 30 year old models or the latest plastic kit. Also, older systems used smaller armies, making them more affordable compared to modern games.

Following that example: In the current Eldar plastic range, a 5 model units costs more than 50€; characters are over 30€. That means that an early nineties metal Striking Scorpion costs half the modern plastic model. With no plastic waste attached.

Today an Old World plastic Chaos Knight costs almost 7€. The Age of Sigmar Chaos Knights cost 11€ each. So, paying between 10€ and 20€ for a lead model that's been OOP for 30 years doesn't look that bad (for those at the back of the class about to say ACKCHYUALLY, have you tried to resell those plastic models after building them?).

It's not news that I've been obsessed with plastic waste in the hobby lately, but I can't stop thinking in the bags (plural) of empty sprues in my closet (literally and metaphorically). If you're buying modern kits, the sprue waste weights more than your built models, with the only exception for heavy kits like scenery or Great Unclean Ones. At the moment of writing this article, plastic sprues can't be recycled at scale. And that thought has been living rent-free in my brain for months.

Dealing with nostalgia.

If you think about it, lots of newly released models base their success in the imitation of the original models (Noise Marine, anyone?). The cool factor is the old factor. If you look at your Realms of Chaos reprints you'll find the details of every mutation, every weapon, every weird detail you've seen in the new Chaos models. And that's true for all the existing ranges (specially Space Orcs).

So when someone yells NOSTALGIA! to explain "why you don't really like old models, you're just falling into some psy-op tactic" I always like to say this: Every one of us have different reasons to switch to old metal stuff. Some of us have more than one reason. You can't know those if you don't ask, and winning internet points for the sake of it isn't the smart move you think it is.

If the new ranges are literally imitating the old ones, Who's falling for nostalgia here? Well, it doesn't matter because in the end we're just old dudes spending money on toys to stop the sad voices in our heads.

Design, design, design.

This is the main point for me.

I started playing Warhammer on December 1993 (well, my aunt bought me a WHFB box for Christmas, 24th of December to precise, but we've been playing Heroquest and Battlemasters for some time then). The art in the rulebook and the bestiary was crazy good (I stayed awake at night looking at the illustrations).

There were lots of blisters in my LFGS' shelves (it was called Valhalla, or Kutulandia for the locals, but it doesn't exist anymore), but those were pretty expensive to us, so we resorted to armies that could be completed using plastics from other boxed games. We bought some blisters now and then, but that wasn't the norm.

A couple of years later I started to have some more pocket money (and with the advent of Magic The Gathering, I started earning money to spend in other hobbies, and later on I worked as a commission painter). But at that point the range had changed: GW started to pivot from old stock to "newer armies". And those being cool, weren't as cool as the original models.

Just to be clear: If you visited any GW store other than GW-Muntaner in Barcelona (the oldest one in Spain), you were looking at the newer ranges. The only reason we managed to see, even touch Marauder or Realm of Chaos miniatures years after their release was because our LFGS stocks sold slowly and restocking wasn't easy.

That achieved one thing: When I got the oldest books decades later, all those awesome models were there. Not the "red era" ones. The good ones.

Take a look to the 40k Chaos Renegades. Or the Marauder (MM70) Dark Elves. Those designs changed through the years and only some elements remain in the modern models (Blood Bowl Dark Elves helms, for example).

Daemons of Slaanesh were thinner and cooler. Plaguebearers were funnier. Slanns were a real thing! I'm not saying the red era models aren't cool. Most of them are. But we got hooked by the previous generation of models, that was our "metal crack".

And again, the art was so good, it was even better than the models! That was the magic trick: Art and text would inspire you to build and paint. Period.

Lots of those design elements, or looks, are lost. And some of them appear now and then on new sculpts, and that's on purpose. But the moment we started to see clean, identical renders from video games, action figures and miniatures I lost all interest (yeah, a new Space Marine is identical to a Joy Toy model, just smaller).

For those as me that see goofiness as a plus, and like a gritty photocopied fanzine full of illustrations over a modern rulebook, having access to old models has been a blast. It's a matter of taste, but mainly, it's a matter of what hooked you into this: For some those were the Perry's Imperial Guard sculpts. For others were Kev Adams' Forest Goblins. For the older chaps, were the second edition Blood Bowl teams and the Astrogranite polystyrene board. All is OK. Because in The Year of the Lord 2024 everything looks old. And nothing's more legit than the rest. But I felt I needed to point that there are clear advantages in collecting old models.

Availability, Anglo-centrism and corporate social media.

On the cons side of this hobby there's this difficulty to find rare models out of the UK. No matter how many hundreds or thousands of copies of one model were sold in the UK in the late 80s and early 90s. Only a fraction of those got to continental Europe, and less of those got to Spain. So if you aren't willing to pay Goldfish-level prices, you have to be patient (for those not used to this world, there's an infamous eBay seller called like that, known by their high prices ; as an example, I recently bought two complete lead Great Unclean Ones for the price of two of those kit's bits sold by Goldfish standards).

There's also this language barrier: Collectors and hobbyists from the UK and USA aren't known by their ability to speak any other language than English (and some of them are really proud of that) so there's a bias in forums, chat rooms and social media we could talk about in the future.

And then there's Meta. Facebook groups make almost 100% of this community (forums are graveyards nowadays). Add Instagram for the weird people that like to paint old models (some of them even play) and that's it. So if you like to play it hard as I do, and don't have Meta accounts anymore, this will be harder. Not impossible, but harder.

Posers.

Some people have been accused of being posers because they were born after this kind of stuff disappeared from the shelves. Young adults or teenagers that never saw a lead model, have full YT channels or Insta accounts for their painted early nineties Space Orcs. Even I've fallen into that negative discourse in the past. Do you know what? Fuck it. Collect and paint stuff you like. Share it. Make enamel pins or stickers if you fancy them. That's the amazing stuff we all love to see.

I'm not talking about posh YouTubers that can't paint, but somehow got you into paying subscription money so they could buy old stuff, while spooning you with retro content (mostly White Dwarf screenshots). I hate those people. Those are the real posers.

So collect what you like, but please, please paint the fucking models. Don't buy them and then hide the army in a closet for a decade. That's not a cool thing to do 😅.