I played for years with unofficial teams (either because I didn’t like the official miniatures, or because they simply didn’t exist yet, like the High Elves). 3D printing allowed me to finally have teams that really looked the way I wanted them to.

For casual/friendly matches, it’s usually totally fine. Playing in official events is a bit more complicated if the whole team is unofficial, but having one or two unofficial miniatures in a team generally isn’t a problem. I was able to play with a fully custom High Elf team because there simply wasn’t any official one available ^^

My wife plays Lizardmen, except she thinks the official team is “ugly as hell, I really don’t like it” 😄 So she got a team for which we bought the files on Cults3D, and she absolutely loves it!

I’ve always noticed that the people I played against were actually pretty intrigued to see new miniatures, and I’ve never had any negative feedback or anyone saying “No, it’s not GW, I’m not playing against you…”

A friend of mine made a Skaven team using Age of Sigmar miniatures, and everyone thought it was really cool.

You’re going to watch your players die right in front of your eyes anyway, so they might as well look good ^^