Rain

Most Chaos Space Marines players tend to want an army of…Chaos Space Marines. Not demons, not mortals, not beastmen. This was understood as far back as the 2nd edition Chaos codex, in a designer’s note to this exact effect. They specifically wrote the book to allow for the option of demons and cultists, but to focus on providing a complete and workable force of pure Chaos Space Marines. Personally I find cultists boring, if I wanted to play human chaff, I’d have picked Guard. That said, I do like beastmen as they are at least unique to Chaos. I still think that Jakhals should have been beastmen rather than Mad Max warboys.

All logic, sanity, and reason points to datasheets being printed for the 4 Cult Legions given the Cult heads shown. So yeah, safe to say this will be vanilla CSM only.

Indeed. Some of the recent Emperor’s Children models feature peeled skin, leather bondage straps hooked into faces, and combat drug tubes plugged directly into flesh. GW is definitely trying to appeal to Modern Audiences with some of their recent art, lore, and models, but kiddie friendly they are not, at least with Chaos.

That’s a heckin yikes my guy. Reddit is a wholesome quirky chungus.

To add to your point 1, the new philosophy is, quite literally, less seamless than the old. Under the old model design philosophy, the seams between pieces were at logical points where one piece of armor ends, and another begins. The legs and torso, each arm, the shoulder pads, the head. I guess the one exception was bodies that came in a front and back and glued together, but that was fairly minor. Now, you will have seams running down the sides of legs, or across parts of arms or bodies. The new demon prince, while looking great if/when done, is an absolute nightmare of randomly cut chunks that fit together like a Fabergé egg. Such models are very annoying to build, and require a significant amount of extra green stuff work and sanding to get rid of all of these ugly seams, which in turn massively increases the time that it takes to build said models. Removing mold lines was already the most time consuming part of modelling for me (and most frustrating as there are always a few that sneak through) and now this new fresh hell of filling the semi-random jigsaw seams is somehow even worse. I basically agree with the rest of what you said, especially the transportability. Some of these new models are an absolute nightmare to pack quickly and safely. Sure there is some upside, as many of the new pre-designed poses are good as long as you are only fielding 1 or 2 units. 6 Flawless Blades look great despite the repeated leg and body poses because of the variance in swords and heads. Beyond that it would start to look very odd, though luckily(?) no one would ever run more than 6 anyway.

The Catachans have a Carl Weathers model? That’s incredibly awesome. What’s wrong? Inquisition got you pushing too many pencils?

They are aggressively okay. They look a lot like updated mini-Helbrutes. I'm really not a fan of the fleshmetal Chaos look, but at least they look better than most of the abominations vomited out during the 6th edition Chaos wave of fleshmetal designs. Oh, and yes, they look better than Eightbound, but looking better than Eightbound is like beating Peter Dinklage at basketball.

I really really want to add a big purple demon-crab to my slowly growing EC force, which is why I can practically promise you that it will not be available to the EC

I think what draws a lot of Iron Warrior fans is specifically that they are cybernetic, and generally not mutated or chaotic. While I’m sure that varies warband to warband, if people really want to play a highly mutated and chaotic CSM army they have Word Bearers and Black Legion. Iron Warriors are the “autistic tech geek gets to be an antihero badass” fantasy, which is, let’s just say understandable in its appeal to a certain portion of the 40k fanbase. Oh, and the plain shoulderpads are supposed to be painted in hazard stripes. The iconic IW design element. All of that said, I like the Corsairs models more. The Corsairs are all home runs other than the Wallace and Gromit looking Huron face.

I love the conversions, and the character of each of the named minis. Really like the Reaverzerkers too, great way to integrate some HH flavor into a BL army. Thanks for sharing, keep it up.

Sure, and that’s precisely what people with pre-spinoff EC armies should probably do. Or slowly buy “EC” models to add on, and end up with two armies, along with crossover units like Rhinos and Demon Princes. It even makes lore sense, as Chaos warbands vary greatly in their makeup. A warband led by an Emperor’s Children lord with a core of EC followers might end up merging with, recruiting, and absorbing various other elements, and this would be best represented on the table by the CSM book and not the EC one.

Nothing stops you from playing the CSM book with green Nurgle themed models. If you want Raptors, Oblits, etc. play that. If you want Plague Crawlers, Bloat Drones, etc. play the DG book. Otherwise, Cult Legions would just be strictly better versions of the base/unmarked CSM army. DG are the worst army to make this argument for, as they actually get many bespoke units, while retaining the staple motor pool, which should be standard across all Chaos factions. Their roster makes for a complete and flavorful army, that trades some undivided units for Nurgle demon engines, two kinds of unique Terminators, etc. EC got shafted as they bizarrely lost Predators, Forgefiends, Defilers, and Helbrutes, even though WE and TS, both of which launched after EC, kept all of these units. So, fair enough, they’re not in a great place, but I guess time will tell. I hope that this is a sign of an EC second wave in 11th to fill the gaps.

I want new Defilers and Helbrutes with Legion options so badly, even if the Legion options are purely cosmetic. Especially as it would mean that EC would get more datasheets, which they very sorely need.

I think our only disagreement (if any) is about what constitutes being “in the sonic cult.” I am all for many EC having speakers, distended mouths for warp scream, doom sirens, etc., and indeed many of the models do. The line infantry have speakerlike grilles on legs and backpacks, there are speakermouth heads, etc. I just like the Fabius Bile trilogy idea that “true” Noise Marines are a breed apart that not only use noise as a weapon and/or form of stimulus, but worship the Song of Slaanesh as an expression or form of their god. That doesn’t preclude other EC that are not explicitly Noise Marines from also using noise weapons or warp scream, but I like the distinction between those that use such weapons for pure self-gratification versus those that use them as a kind of religious sacrament. Such “true” Noise Marines cease being “perfection seeking duelists” because their religious obsession with noise/the SoS is so singular.