Two Horus Heresy Battle Group Boxes Are Coming, but There’s No Price Yet
Thirty Legionaries and a tank or two per box is the kind of army you can start painting the same weekend you open it. Games Workshop has now shown two more boxes built that way for Warhammer: The Horus Heresy, and the one thing it hasn’t shown is what they cost.
On November 2, Warhammer Community revealed the Vanguard Assault and Heavy Assault Battle Groups. Both are Legiones Astartes sets, and Games Workshop says they “will save you money compared with buying the contents individually.” They are due for pre-order “soon.” There is no price and no release date yet.
The Vanguard Assault Battle Group holds 20 Mark VI Tactical Squad Legionaries, 10 Mark VI Assault Squad Legionaries, a Legion Praetor with Power Sword, a Contemptor Dreadnought, a Deimos Pattern Rhino and a Deimos Pattern Predator Battle Tank. It is the faster, lighter of the two: a line of troops, a fast assault unit, and enough armor to carry them.
The Heavy Assault Battle Group goes the other way. It has 20 Mark III Tactical Squad Legionaries, 10 Mark III Breacher Squad Legionaries, 5 Mark III Legion Command Squad Legionaries, 6 Cataphractii Terminators with Volkite Chargers and Power Mauls, and a Land Raider Explorator/Carrier. Both boxes work for any Legion, so the paint scheme and the side you fight for are your call, as OnTableTop notes that they suit Loyalists and Traitors alike.
The number everyone will want is the saving, and that is where the gap in the announcement matters. Wargamer priced every unit separately from the Warhammer webstore and came to $414.75 / £253.50 for Vanguard and $386 / £237 for Heavy. Its own guess for the boxes is an MSRP of about $250 / £165 or more, which it based on the last big box, Maximus, at $220 / £140. That is a guess, not a Games Workshop price. If it lands anywhere near, the deal is real. If it doesn’t, we’d rather say so than assume.
There is a caveat on the army side too. Wargamer points out that Heavy leans on heavy infantry with short-ranged guns, which suits Death Guard, Iron Warriors, Salamanders or Sons of Horus better than a fast, shooty list. It also notes that The Horus Heresy is balanced around 3,000-point armies, and by its count the two boxes land between roughly 780 and 1,324 points each, depending on how you build them. Buying both gets you most of the way to a full game, not all of it. If you’re new to the Mark III kits, the Mark III Tactical Squad is the same infantry kit that fills the bulk of the Heavy box, so you can see what you’d be building.
We’ll check back once Games Workshop names a price and a pre-order date, and we’ll say plainly whether the saving holds up.
Header image: Photo via Pexels.
