Goatboy’s Old Hammer 40K: Old School Meta-Chasing Must-Have Units
Goatboy here with a look at some of the old edition must-have units. These are things that were usually expensive to get, everyone rushed to grab them, and then watched as they got nerfed into the ground.
Let’s pull back the curtain and remember old busted units that might have left us a bit too early in their edition life.
Chaplain Dreadnought – Forge World – Space Marines – 8th Edition
This is an interesting kit as it was just a throwaway model in the Forgeworld line up. Once you got a busted Iron Hands “supplement” and a pretty mean set of rules attached to a character dreadnought and you had a mixture of something very powerful. The old 8th Edition rules had characters lose the ability to join units but couldn’t be shot unless it was a sniper or some other power that let you target characters. On top of that protection it was also a Dreadnought at the same time too so extremely tough. I remember seeing a lot of these kit bashed as well as a ton of “resin” dreadnoughts from “Forgeworld”. There was a time where these showed up in just about every Marine army.
Razorwing Flock – Dark Eldar/Drukhari – 7th Edition
I remember when this unit first came out and you could create giant squads of these things, other beast pack options, and a few characters to join up. These guys would just cover the table in 4+ invulnerable saves, tons of wounds, and rending attacks. It was a nightmare to play against and if you found someone with real models it was a pain to even get. I remember so many players looking high and wide for bad plastic little birds to use with a Zombicide model used heavily as it was plastic and not insanely expensive. This was way before you could easily 3d print out a ton of them. I think I played against it once and was super glad this unit went away quickly.
Fire Raptor – Forge World – Chaos Space Marines/Space Marines – 6th Edition
Oh to remember the days of seeing an ATC event and every army had Fire Raptors. The high flying Forge World unit was hard to shoot, shot very hard, and was just about everywhere. This was really before the push to limit what types of armies people could bring to a team event. Heck I even remember a friend who might wear specific pants casting a whole bunch of them and then selling them at the end of the event. It was a wild time to see all these flyers zooming around the table top and wrecking anything they saw on the table. Whoever went first in the flyer fight would end up winning the game.
Ork Buggies – Speedfreaks – 9th Edition
Do you remember how the release of the Freeboota army for the Orks ruined a whole tournament? Do you remember how GW nerfed it by only allowing you to take 1 of each type of Buggy and thus ruining a lot of players armies who bought more than one of some of the best options? How wild was it that the old rule of 3 got broken to only allow the rule of 1 buggy? It was a crazy time to see something hit so hard after players bought so many models to kit out their army – especially one that is a pretty expensive purchase.
ThunderWolf Calvary Counts-As Models (before the actual unit came out) – Space Wolves – 5th Edition
Do you remember when GW would release rules for units but didn’t release any models? Did you know the only Thunderwolf they released was Canis for a while so that was the only model to base your army off of? Do you know how many Chaos Knights were used to represent Thunder Wolves? Or how about all those initial resin knock offs that came out when that unit showed up? Or your poor little Goatboy who made a ton of Space Goats riding Metal Juggernauts and calling them Thunder Goats?
~What other meta-chasing flash in the pan do you remember fondly from the days of 40K yore?
