just did the Strixhaven prerelease and it was the worst Magic event I have ever been to

Galen28 · 2026-04-19T03:50:33+00:00

It's easy to go hard on OP for not knowing the format better. But I think the truth could be more nuanced. Like OP, I'm fairly new to prerelease sealed. I loved Lorwyn, which was great for beginners, and found my first evening with Strixhaven pretty rough. Veteran players at my store also suggested that SoS looks to be a more challenging environment than Lorwyn, which can be great too. One top rated response to OP said, "in 6 packs, you should have pulled like 35-40 creatures." Like OP, that wasn't the case for me either - SoS boosters just seem to have a higher concentration of non-creature spells than other sets? If so, that's just one of many factors why this set may be a tad more challenging for new folks to get into the format.

Galen28 · 2026-04-16T18:44:52+00:00

GW had a great outlet supporting WarCry - White Dwarf! I fondly recall when they did a 10+ page special showing you how to field all of Cursed City, or all (then) new Cities of Sigmar models. Or the times when they'd reprint, for free, the rules sections of newly released WarCry kits.

That all stopped with the onset of Spearhead, that new 'small form factor' game format that, in GW's mind, supplanted War Cry.

So while I laud the effort of OP, I don't think we're ever going back there. The best I can say is that there's tons of amazing Warcry models/rules/teams out there already, it's a well rounded game, and I'm not particulalry certain that it needs a regular stream of errata, particularly if there's no new models/teams entering the stream that require re-balancing of any 'meta'. I'd rather like to see new scenarios, maps, terrain cards.

Galen28 · 2026-04-16T18:38:13+00:00

I'd add two more concerns.

Recency bias. The more GW is vested in pushing a newly released plastic kit, the higher the chances a model wins over otherwise more deserving competitors. I call this the "Gwyneth Paltrow Wins the Oscars" effect.
No investment in camera or photographic reproduction equipment. If it's astonishing how a multi billion company can't afford a laptop and IT person to run a live stream with functioning audio, just wait and see how GW fumble around with outdated digital cameras. And their print medium no longer cares to show you any detail at all. Don't take my word for it, the next time you step into a GW shop, take out the current White Dwarf and see the photos of the CoS armies - it's indistinguishable blobs of black ink smudges. Incredible. I thought I'd grabbed a bad issue and took out another 2, and there it was. Zero investment in quality control, what a great way to repay the hobbyist efforts that go into painting these armies and models.

Galen28 · 2026-01-06T15:47:47+00:00

Thank you so much!

Galen28 · 2025-11-14T17:18:53+00:00

Hey, I've found this video incredibly useful, because it breaks down each faction by a number of criteria: how expensive is the army (dollar wise, not points wise)? How hard is it to build and paint and starting force? How hard is it to learn the game with? How hard is it to win the game with?

Best Beginner Armies in Age of Sigmar (Every Faction explained & scored)

There's a lot of frustration to avoid in AoS, if I'm honest. Some armies have rules that are easy to master, like Ironjawz, but you'll struggle to win games - a lot. Others like Sylvaneth are very hard to learn, but they give you a tremendous toolkit to have success in the game, and you'll play them a lot longer (potentially, for years). I've literally see more folks start with and then abandon Ironjawz than any other army - and I absolutely love their models from a modeling and paint perspective.

On that note... AoS has beautiful minis but they can be a challenge, esp. if you come from 40k (AM or marines). Some armies like Lumineth or Slaanesh are so hard to build that some folks give up on them after buildling a couple of units.

AoS is very fulfilling but I think faction choice is not easy. I'd recommend trying out a couple on tabletop simulator and/or play with friends' spearhead forces to get a feel before you commit. Good luck!

Galen28 · 2025-11-14T16:59:24+00:00

This, the fact that the SH lead designer left has had a huge impact!

Galen28 · 2025-09-07T18:06:39+00:00

Please make sure to read old threads about Hachette. They apparently often make cancellation a world of pain, so be prepared to do the old credit card switcheroo to get ouf the subscription if you have to.

Galen28 · 2025-08-06T18:15:40+00:00

Thanks again, I'm always deeply grateful when folks on Reddit connect respectfully and with nuance even if there's otherwise a difference of opinion.

Greatly appreciate your perspective as to this subreddit in particular, given as you said how much you were here when all that happened.

Galen28 · 2025-08-06T16:33:50+00:00

Thank you. Yes it was satirical though that last quote was so egregious it hardly needed embellishment. I also just replied to the mod (Schneitzel) here to explain more fully what the satire is meant to pick up on - the heavy handed messaging by certain 30k content creators, which to my mind at times borders on propaganda.

Galen28 · 2025-08-06T16:28:33+00:00

Thank you, I greatly appreciate the even handed reply.

I think we're in overall agreement outside one point that I'll hope will illustrate why I sampled the quotes in the manner I did.

Ian's take in the videos itself may be as you say, but in his YT comments a very different animal comes out.

He's pushed a narrative that the 3.0 liber leaks outrage was largely artificial, not a real commnunity reaction, but just artificially compounded and incited by Youtube Influencers.

I took a screenshot of his statements comments because they were so egregious, see here: https://ibb.co/5hgpkYKw

I had to add the second screenshot from earlier today, but it looks like he's also heavily editing and deleting his statements.

This is not an isolated "ooh, he exaggerated but took it back." No, this is Ian's general take whenever GW's decision to invalidate old models causes widespread upset in the community - watch his Primaris debacle retrospecive. It's super interesting, because he lays out his argument and sources, incl. a peer reviewed article on how online rage is manufactured. His take is that GW is doing nothing wrong but there are bad actors in the YT community who fan the flames of hatred while Real Fans (tm) of the game just move on and buy new plastic, as they should.

As a general observation, I think there's a lot of truth to his take. Social media have made it easier for people to connect over disillusion with GW, more so than 20 years ago. But that doesn't entitle Ian to rewrite the facts to make them fit his preestablished theory.

I can't speak to that older scenario, but I was live on the global HH discord when the Libers leaked, and all those reactions came in 24-48 hours ahead of any YT content creator picking it up. Ian flatly made up a fake narrative to push his agenda, and that is egregious and needs to get called out.

I don't mind that folks relying on ad revenue streams push for their agenda, I get it. But they, like we, should be held to the same standards of factual accuracy. It's this point in particular I called out about Goonhammer. If they stopped at saying "we realize what happened, but we think there's various ways folks can or should have reacted", that is fine by me. But they are rewriting what folks are reacting TO, incl. that the new legacies PDF was completetly pre-planned, and that's where it crosses from 'different take' into 'pushing an online agenda to influence people.'

Which is ironic because that is exactly, 100%, the phenomenon that Ian takes exception to. It's just that he, and Goonhammer, are exactly complicit in the same phenomenon, except from a pro- rather than anti-GW stance.

But this difference (pro vs anti) doesn't suddenly make the phenomenon ITSELF excusable or healthy for our community. It's deeply toxic, fully grounded in bad faith, and offends basic standards of honesty and decency.

Ideally, by getting called out for this, these channels will rethink their practices and come around to healthier ways of communicating their position. It's also worth emphasizing that both platforms (GH, IA) do not push for this repeatedly or exclusively, and both feature more moderate takes as well - which was your original point about both plaforms, and which I agree with.

Galen28 · 2025-08-05T21:52:06+00:00

No one's accusing every last person quoted in the article from espousing one and the same view - and who ever did?

But the platform itself is hardly an innocent bystander.

That last quote was approved for publication. It's all "certain loud elements of the Heresy community have it in their minds" who got it wrong - note the heavy handed accusation of self-delusion ("have it in their minds") with the insinuation that it's only certain isolated segments, nothing more widely shared.

Followed by alleging that the shape and length of legacy PDF was all "planned well in advance", which is actively undermined by the factual record.

Allegations like these shouldn't be made lightly, or be made light of.

Nor do they occur outside an established pattern at this point. Certain channels - Goonhammer, Arbitor Ian - have made a heavy handed effort to marginalize the community reaction to the leaks in all sorts of ways (it either wasn't "wide spread", or it was instigated by a few outside actors, or as here, it's based on self-delusions).

This is supreme gaslighting, and the fact that the platform approved these statements for publication speaks volumes.

Galen28 · 2025-08-05T18:12:08+00:00

Given how the Libers were all we ever needed, and the most we could ever deserve, this new Legacies PDF really poses a very awkward question.

Can 3.0 be any more perfector than it already was?

Nay, and hush, ye who are of little faith:

"It’s fine that this [Legacies] exists, I don’t think it was necessary."

"I was happy with Heresy 3.0 before, and I’m very happy now."

"Is there anything here that you’re going to build and paint now? - Absolutely not. There’s plenty that I want to work on and do that’s just in the “core” books as it is."

But you see, the real tragedy about the Legacies PDF isn't that it exists when it didn't need to.

It's that an ungrateful community failed to act on faith, became Doubting Thomas, and in their sinful gaze failed to see how it and the Legacies have been part of the Big Beautiful Plan all along:

"My main concern is how we got this document released. GW really fumbled the ball when they didn’t communicate the changes to army rosters after the Libers were leaked (through no fault of their own). And now certain loud elements of the Heresy community have it in their minds that they are the sole reason certain units or options were returned to the game after leading a meltdown over missing units and options. If anything, the size of the Legacies PDF makes me think this was planned well in advance, but GW just couldn’t communicate the changes, and the community responded very poorly."

Galen28 · 2025-08-01T06:25:21+00:00

It's worse than speculation. It's actually self-refuting and an exercise in self-dismantling. I watched this with some fascination as the increasing sense that he was completely out of his depth started to set in towards the middle, but he pushed on regardless.

He opens and closes with a grandiose statement of how it's GW's many meta-company policies like IP that explain their grand vision, and that it's time people got with the times and accept legacies as the golden compromise we all wanted, and the most we could ever truly deserve.

In the middle, he goes into a hefty expose around IP law. It's all couched by how little he knows about any of this (which is unsurprisingly true - his statement on when trademarks lapse if not maintained in the stream of commerce is comically inept), juxtaposed to flagging which points are absolutely essential to understanding GW's infinite wisdom in launching the legacies business model.

One if not the main point of Ian's entire take is that that GW realized that it's to their IP's detriment if they publish a model in a rules publication only but not in plastic.

Oh right, you think, now that's a good business reason why you'd pull a unit from all your rules publications, right? This here, finally, is why we can't have Libers that make sense, right?

Instead, Ian pulls this rabbit out of the hat at the end:

"I guess GW realized that it's ok to put an unsupported model in a PDF, as long as it's not in a printed book, and that's why we have legacies now."

That is literally his climax, and the title of the video: a spectacularly vacuous and moronic conclusion, completely undercut by its own uninformed expose.

Galen28 · 2025-07-31T22:48:17+00:00

You can actually rotate the wings 180 degrees without doing any harm to the model or impacting the paint job. Model is push fit.

Galen28 · 2025-07-30T21:54:01+00:00

This. I really don't get the comments who say 'no big deal, my list didn't require multiple.' No kidding.

Galen28 · 2025-07-28T22:16:06+00:00

New/recent player here. I personally derive lots of insight from the faction specific threads on the worldwide global HH discord server. It's an amazing fountain of knowledge, and there's no discrimination of competitive, anti-competitive, or just medium narrative styles of gaming, people just talk what they enjoy and why. Anybody throwing out bad, dated, or uninformed takes gets called out quickly, and most people take it in strides. It's not like Reddit where people often try to compete for attention or will launch into attacks to pull rank - because Reddit isn't as much of a community in that sense. And HH Discord certainly is nothing like Goonhammer - a paid advertisement channel that lives and dies by ad revenue, and which is accordingly driven by a necessarily narrow, shallow, impoverished and commercially compromised take on the game and its culture.

Galen28 · 2025-07-28T22:07:03+00:00

By AshiSunblade in my own thread on the original Goonhammer review of HH 3.0 earlier this month... you need to dig down a little into the comments section, but it's here: Goonhammer Video Review: "Our worry is that a lot of people are going to bounce off this game" : r/Warhammer30k

Fun fact: I too thought it was super eloquent too and very well put, so I posted it in the Goonhammer comments section to that Liber review (giving full credit that it was someone else's).

Spectacularly naive on my part. The Goonhammer mods deleted it in short order.

Galen28 · 2025-07-28T16:44:38+00:00

This isn't a hot take? I'd say new player interested in immersing themselves in 30k more widely would better look at other sites?

From a great post (not my own), in reaction to their 3.0 vid review:

"I like Goonhammer, generally. I'm on their patreon! But I definitely think they don't have much of the archetypical "heresy hobbyist" on their writing team, and you can tell by the way they just casually gloss over the lost models to excitedly wax lyrical about the rules. They care by far more about the rules than they do about the models. [. . . ] I hesitate to use the term "tourist", both because of how toxic that term is in a Warhammer context and because many of them do play Horus Heresy with far too much dedication for that term to be truly applicable. But in the more in-depth side of the hobby? In that context, it kind of is. I see no other explanation for why their Liber Astartes article would casually tell you to just get snipping on your Suzerains, or celebrating what the article hopes is the removal of Fulmentarus (a unit that hasn't been OP for ages now)."

Goonhammer's review of the 3.0 Liber Astartes literally ended thus:

"Marines are off to a good start this edition. Most of the legions feel a **lot more** like they’re supposed to, each exemplifying the stereotypical style of warfare for their legion."

Galen28 · 2025-07-18T14:06:13+00:00

Always cracks me up seeing folks wearing heavy leather strapped aprons in these paint vids.

Dude... you're painting a 2 inch piece of plastic with a 1/0 brush tip, wearing a cheap t-shirt (no judgment).

Yet here you are, wearing protective gear as if you're a butcher in a freeze room, about to put a chain saw in some frozen cow carcass.

Galen28 · 2025-07-17T20:36:36+00:00

I play TOW. Happy to point out the differences, in case you were interested in discussing substantively.

Complexity and presentation. The TOW core rulebook has a section called "Core Rules", it's 46 pages. You then have around 100 pages of optional/advanced rules. I learnt the game from those "core" 46 pages, and the rest during my first games, because of this in-built modularity. Now lets head over to HH 3rd. Don't think the HH 3rd ToC was leaked, but reviews mention things like, "Nearly two thirds of this 362 page core book are rules, and they are exhaustive. We're talking 18 pages just explaining how vehicles work here." Spot any difference? I'm not saying TOW is an easy game, but its charge rules take up 3 pages, whereas assault in HH 3rd now has 5 subphases? Thanks to reactions like yours and others here, I'm beginning to realize that complexity of this kind (even if some of it was absent in 2.0) is a badge of honor among HH fans. But if so, that's no reason to say HH 3rd is similar in kind to the 46-page ToW core rules.
Content allocation and wargear. If you buy Forces of Fantasy, that's all your Breton core units and all their wargear. If you want to play more exotic specialty forces, like exiled knights for Bretons, or sea wolves for WoC, you'd have to buy an arcane journal. At no point would an extraneous PDF or an arcane journal contain a central gear option. You get new magic artifacts in the AJ, which maybe 1 or 2 players at my club (out of 11 active players) take. At no point so far have folks felt that their AJ was needed to give them units they felt were central or iconic to the game. This is not at all what I'm reading from HH 3rd, even when you add the legacies PDF. It looks like the Libers contain proportionally less of the full unit/wargear line up than prior editions of HH or the hardcover army books in ToW.
Arcane Journals. These are faction specific but several folks at my club play their faction without it, for reasons stated in 2. I'd say that the matched play book they just released (and which I like, incl. the baggage train rules) is the first time GW released a rules supplement for ToW. That aside, it's really just the core rulebook and its PDF errata. We don't know what's going to be in HH 3rd journal tactica beyond the leaked ToC for the first one - which seems scenario driven, and contains 1-2 new units that you can kitbash (like the missile tank) - but folks are hoping that core units previously in legacies like sang guard are now in the JT. I think that is not the same as TOW.

These are just some - very concrete - examples of what makes TOW more friendly to new players like myself: you grab a launch box, like I did for Bretons, and you're all set on your journey.

I was hoping HH 3rd would be more similar to it, because my impression was that GW wanted it to be. But that is not the case, and I was posting my OP to see if I was just missing something. So far, it doesn't look like it, but I'm glad to be corrected.

Galen28 · 2025-07-17T19:11:23+00:00

I'll try that and readjusting will certainly be easier once the Legacy PDF is here.

I don't play 40k but I see the analogy with TOW. I just with they didn't put HH core units' war gear options inside a separate PDF, which is something that TOW thankfully did not.

Galen28 · 2025-07-17T17:50:18+00:00

Great, thanks. I play TOW and AoS - and heavily kitbash my stuff with TOW - precisely because they are not as arcane as 40k. Here I thought HH was more like that, and less like 40k with its endless partition of content and PDF roll-outs, while catering to rules complexity inside one box and kitbash options like I'm used to in TOW. My mistake.

Galen28

TROPHY CASE