Marshal Reinhard

My main question is how viable it will be to enhance the paintjob yourself with selective brush strokes....

I haven't been this tempted by Green since Gorkamorka

Heavy bolters, melta AND grav? Yeah, no. Not buying it. They're not gonna turn eradicators into new devestators.

These guys are the reason I call classic marines 'classic marines' rather than firstborn. Firstborn refer to these guys. Though I feel pretty alone in doing so.

While I think there's a nugget of truth that a lot of the complaints on the subject of the knee ridges are precisely because they're entirely associated with the new and not at all with the old (not something anyone could ever prove because noone would ever admit to it), I would myself as an adopter of the new like to see more models without them, not because I mind them in anyway but because I would welcome the variation. The old face plates or helmet tubing or cabling on the torso etc is all fine and dandy, but they could have been a bit more adventurous here. Having a model with say, mk3 vambraces, or the cabling that Captain centos had, or older style backpack, parts with bonding studs etc would not have gone amiss. Even so I think the intercessor squad here is a fine looking intercessor squad and a lot more interesting than the first outing way back in 8th. That said if I were to get them I would have a large pool of further customization options to use from various upgrade bits from my chapter of choice, but not everyone has that available to them.

There's a beakie faceplate (I have dug my grave on the hill that any marine helm model made the last decade with slanted or curved armor over the ear piece is actually a mkX helm, as I've discussed extensively elsewhere...) in the space wolves update as well. The ones in the Ravenguard upgrade sprue were the first ones though.

I guess the possible issue you have is that the pauldron feels more floaty than we're used too? Would you have raised this concern if the pauldron's top edge was touching the gorget like right one is?

Honestly, I feel like there might have been an intention maybe somewhere that this box was going to be before the wolf refresh, but then was shuffled about due to scheduling, so the wolves ended up first and stealing the thunder of "omg, older mark faceplates and stuff" It's a just a pet theory of mine, but it makes sense I feel.

I feel like this is actually quite a nice box and a really good starter point for new players. I could see myself adding most of the things here to my rather sizeable force as well. But I'd be lying if I said I feel the same excitement as I did for the 9th or 10th edition boxes. As it is, I probably will add most things, possibly after pruning some earlier purchases to make room. I like the prevalence of mk7 face plates (I'll avoid calling them full helmets as I've discussed that before), and wish I'd have had access to them earlier.

I mean, this is an edition starter box, so they won't really be made for varied assembly. They'll be ETB style, one way that then depends on how many grots there are, and if its a repeated sprue. A potential future mpk would then also hold different poses from these as well.

As much as I want the marine section to be pruned, because it's a burgeoning monstrosity the size of several other factions combined, ultimately I have to come to the same end point as I do with the killing off of named characters: "it's easy to consign someone else's characters to death to meet some arbitrary balance quota rather than your own favorites" Rather than legending tacticals they should've joined them with the intercessor sheet, making one master unit for all variant loadouts. With how many recent units are just a direct translation of an older unit, it seems GW are much less trying to reinvent the wheel now anyways.

Better than the drip feed we been getting

See now this i like

Questoris update needed so badly. just the lower half really

A gravis apothecary, techmarine and chaplain I did based on a few named characters. It was some of the last models I did before the big Templar refresh came about. There were/are no rules for these, so they're strictly for fun conversions. It still amuses me that when Leviathan came along, it basically made the apothecary a legal unit through the Apothecary biologis. I'd update the model slightly to reflect that.