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With the recent price raise, I was looking into buying things from sites that sell miniatures but not at it's exhorbitant prices. Either stores that sell GW merch for less, or other miniature companies altogether, I don't really care which, though is has to be able to ship to Canada.
Sorry if this is in the wrong section, I was thinking of having it in swap shop, but from what I can see, everything there is a "trade" and there aren't any threads that deal with anything other trades.

This would likely do best in discussions, moving it there.

*Cough*

Only one I have used so far is:
http://www.gc-minis.com/index.htm

They are pretty cheap (30% off), and since its vancouver based (I think), you won't get charged PST if you're in ontatrio, which is great. I'm not sure how the change to HST affects this, but I hope it hasn't changed anything.

They have some downsides though. They are very slow, and while the shipping process itself is normal speed, they don't send it for about a month (At least in my case, and I've read the same elsewhere) so be patient if you use them.

Another issue is that they charge for shipping. It was $15 + 3% of your order, so the more you order, the cheaper the shipping relative to your order cost. This makes it better if you do it in large chunks. Also helps if you have a friend/relative who also wants to order, you can combine the costs and share an order, getting full savings and only paying half shipping costs each. It is probably ideal for starting an army in one go.

It's not the best company, but I was too scared of getting shafted by customs charges. LunaHound has said that the customs fees are pretty random, sometimes a lot and sometimes nothing, so I just played it safe.

I've read about a site called Maelstrom games, what're most people's opinions on them?

Mini Wargaming is a good site. Their stuff is usually 10% off and every day they have a special deal. These deals vary between 30% and 70%.

http://store.miniwargaming.com/

maelstrom games is a good site, but with the current economics I do not know if the exchangerate is optimal for you... I used it for most of my recent purchases and they have not failed me yet (except with 1 outstanding order of more then 3 months ago. PrivateerPress had a delay and they are waiting for the release of the model...)

an alternative on the other side of the ocean is trhe warstore. I don't know them personally so I will not comment on the store any further...


Edit: @#%#@ grammar...

I bought my battalion boxes off Amazon's marketplace. They were about 20 bucks cheaper than GW, and the one place had free shipping.

There are cheap online stores like Malstrom or the Warstore ( http://www.thewarstore.com/ ), there are cheap lines like Mantic.

There are stores that sell many non-GW miniature lines. I start every search in this German store (that also sells internationally):
http://www.battlefield-berlin.de/shop/index.php

I've had good experiences and good prices from Warstore and Rattlehead games. Rattlehead doesn't carry GW, but they (unlike everyone else I think) lowerd the price of their Pig Iron stuff to match the exchange rate!

I'm fairly certain both will ship to Canada.

I've used both gc-minis (although it was 10ish years ago) and miniwargaming more recently. I've never had a problem with either of them. The great thing with miniwargaming is that once they ship I usually get the package the next day. I'm downtown, so I don't know if you'd get the same speed in Aurora or not. Also, having lived in a province with HST I'm sad to report that if you order from another province with the HST you still have to pay.

One thing with miniwargaming is that they run a lot of promotions, so usually I wait a while a place a big order during the sale.