There’s still plenty of Space Marines on the way for this year and beyond for 9th Edition 40k, and it may be time to start budgeting for them.
Looks like you may have to budget a bit more for models and books if you want to play any specific chapter of Space Marines in 9th Edition 40k now.
Taking a look at the datasheet in the 9th edition Space Marine Codex the chapter-specific characters are mostly absent. This means more releases to come, and probably major ones at that too.
There’s Still Plenty of Space Marines On The Way…
Besides the currently seven new model releases that are still on the way for Space Marines, there may be actually more of something we haven’t thought about yet- supplements.
The Current Space Marine Codex is as bare-bones as you could get. This can be nice if you have a specific-chapter-based army because you don’t need two massive books to cover your list, but still get that extra “specialized” fluff and rules for your chapter. However, you’ll still need two books just the same…
While the chapters had rules in the codex (and a FAQ index in some cases), however, it’s very clear that it’s just a stepping stone to last until they get a supplement release, and GW has changed how they go about publishing these tomes:
Codex Vs. Supplement: What’s the difference?
We’ve already got 3 loyalist releases confirmed to be released by the end of the year. These are interesting because if you recall Blood Angels, for example, got a full codex in years past, but now they are just a supplement. Blood Angels are pretty unique as far as rules, models, and lore goes among loyalist chapters. Maybe in an effort to standardize chapters, other chapters are getting upgraded to similar levels of support at least in rules, and that’s why they are all supplements this time around.
Another interesting note is that Death Guard is a full Codex, not a supplement because Chaos Space Marines haven’t got their codex yet. This results in loyalist Chapters having to buy the base codex and the supplement, while Chaos Chapters might only need to buy one…
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Granted with chaos god alignment, chaos Chapters do have a few more unique rules vs loyalist Chapters, but the distinction of codex vs supplement is being very much made by GW.
So How Much Is All This Going To Cost?
Last year right before Psychic Awakening, these supplements were released for the 6 chapters above. These were relatively short supplements offering Chapter focussed rules and lore. For each of the books, there were about a page of traits and a page of relics, a single psychic discipline, 2 pages of stratagems, and datasheets for their chapter-specific characters and/or units. This usually meant less than 15 or so pages of total rules.
The difference between a supplement and a codex right now is $20 USD based on the prices for the Space Wolves and Deathwatch 9th Edition Supplements. So from the looks of it, the cost to play any specific chapter is $80 ($50 for the base codex, and $30 for the “supplement”).
However, with the lack of any special characters in the main codex it looks like each of these supplements, pictured above, that are just over a year old, are going to start getting new versions to complement the 9th edition Space Marine Codex and updated with Psychic Awakening rules as well.
This seems to make sense, as they didn’t really Thanos snap any units into Warhammer Legends oblivion, and each chapter may have access to the majority of Codex Space Marine units and rules.
With Black Templars also having some new release rumors lately, they could even be collected with all the Sons of Dorn into a new Imperial Fist Supplement.
Seeing as Blood Angels got moved down to supplement instead of a codex, we think it makes sense for the Black Templars to get bundled with Imperial Fists again to bulk up the supplement and get closer to the Blood Angels size in an attempt to universalize the size of these new “supplements”.
But now more than ever, who knows what Games Workshop will actually do or when they will even do it.
What do you think about Loyalist vs Chaos Supplements? Do you think more loyalist Supplements are already in the works?
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About the Author: Andrew Schrank
