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It's been awhile since we've had one of these threads. What have you found recently?

I bring this up because a friend who's a big garage sale-er (and who knows about my addiction!) has found for me a complete Wood Elf Battalion, unpainted and unassembled for (drumroll please) Five Bucks! Where you ask? Get out your atlas: Ninlchik Alaska.

Which brings me to my secondary question, one that only God knows the answer to: I wonder what proportion of Games Workshop models are purchased and never opened...? (and how can I get my hands on more of 'em?!?!)

What have you found / bought / obtained recently? Regale us with your tales of frugality!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
.... And I should note I play Kings of War, so these guys will fit in really nicely to my elves army!

Good topic thank you. I think your great deal is going to be hard to top.

Here I was thinking I found a great deal of 30 Hormagaunts for $10. At the 2013 HMGS Historicon flea market. HMGS convention flea markets are great places to find Games Workshop stuff ironically.

I got a great trade from Alfndrate, right as I started thinking seriously about going into Warmachine.

A whole Cygnar force themed around Caine, my favorite Warcaster.

 Kanluwen wrote:
I got a great trade from Alfndrate, right as I started thinking seriously about going into Warmachine.

A whole Cygnar force themed around Caine, my favorite Warcaster.

I got a great trade from Kanluwen, right as I started thinking about getting into Infinity (even just to try it) and to expand my Flames of War, a whole American Parachute Rifle Army and almost 200 points of Nomads.

Things were good, Alf.

Things were good.

I recently picked up highly coveted OOP Epic stuff for some really great prices! Was proud!

Forgeworld Warhounds (Epic scale, mind you!) for $10 apiece.

A massive Epic Tyranid army worth in excess of $500 at ebay prices for only $200.

I have yet to find any of those amazing $5 deals at garage sales, but it sure would be cool!

A reaver titan on ebay for £500 - unassembled with free postage.

I had £360 from previous sales in my paypal account so clicked on buy it now......winner

My bro picked up a giant pile of Warmaster blisters for 2 bucks a pop. Blisters of Bretonnians, Araby, Lizardmen... (worth $60-$100 each)

My friend got me a Bonesinger, still in blister, for $5. So. Damn. Excited.

I used to go to a big swap meet back in riverside, I found OP15 empire knights, 2 OP metal giants, 3 OP armored Orgers about, 25 OP pike men and a few character models for 20 bucks, thats about the best I ve found haha, it was a lucky day.

I think the best deal I have found was when I was looking for some of the older Imperial Armour books to help complete my collection. At the time I was looking for Vol 3. I randomly found it on Ebay Classifieds from a guy out in California. He sold me the book, and some various BFG miniatures for 60 bucks shipped.

What I received was the imperial armour book, and a TON of forgeworld Tau Battlefleet Gothic miniatures. Ended up selling the minis for 4 x what I paid, and kept the book, which was really the only thing I wanted.

Oh! How could I forget? A couple months ago I bought a box full of 40k stuff from a guy getting out of the hobby for $100 even. The thing had a TON of brand new models still on sprue or in blisters and about 6 rare Games Day miniatures. I sold everything off piece part both here and on ebay and made probably $600 when all was said and done.

That was by far the best deal I've ever had.

Old metal Daemon Prince for £13.00 on eBay. Fantastic deal, and I didn't have to buy a Finecast model.

A couple days ago I recieved 5 3rd end DE khymerae and the Beastmaster to go with them for $17 shipped. Painted up nice these will look sharp, but the beastmaster sculpt is beyond ugly.

new sculpt but in metal firedraons 10 for 20 with exarhc.

I spent 100 bucks on an ork army of 3000 points. had three GW battlewagons and 15 nobs 15 lootas 100 shoota boys. About 8 killacans alot was in that chest.

Traded a crap AEG/Airsoft gun for 2k points of Choas. 15 termis 15 plauge marines metal. 25 CSM's four rhinos 1 pred and some more stuff.


Traded 20 necron warriors and 5 Immortals for 20 Assault marines on spru 10 Assualt Termis on spru. 1 mephiston three dreads and a rhino. This was when Crons new stuff just dropped

Paid 50 bucks for a nids battleforce new in box with a tyrant and fex thrown in for making the drive to the seller.

My best deal ever was paying 120 for six boxes of grey knights, 2 GK termis one dread knight four rhinos and there codex. All in the shrink from a guy who was on base in NM who was deploying or what ever leaving the states for six months and impulsed bought them. But since he was leaving for so long he just wanted to sell them. He never got to play but i still keep in contact with him. And since then he went to warmachine/hordes.

Ah, I love threads like this! Good replies, all!

let's keep it going.

Here's a link to my epic Man o' War haul. Someone didn't know what he had...!
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/770118/man-o-war

This last year I went to Kubla con and they have an awesome flea market on the first day. Some guy was selling three Eldar Falcons for $30, but he recognized me from last year - I'd sold him some Uncharted Seas ships which he'd never got to, and were there on the table too. We laughed about it a bit, and he ended up giving me the Falcons for $20 - and there was a Viper in the box too! Not too shabby!

And years ago, I found a copy of the old chit wargame Swords and Sorcery for $0.25! Har.

Go hit up the Branford, CT garbage dump-you can find my missing metal Snipers, Ahriman, Noise Marines and Slaanesh Lord that my friend threw out last week.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
Go hit up the Branford, CT garbage dump-you can find my missing metal Snipers, Ahriman, Noise Marines and Slaanesh Lord that my friend threw out last week.

what What? WHAAT?!?! What happened here? That seems like to terrible a story to be true. Who is this "friend"?

Read the thread I just started under this one...it's all there.


That's not intended to sound rude-sorry if it did.

Being a store owner had some perks at the time.
People would come to me and i'd buy a 'getting out of the hobby' lot pretty much on a weekly basis. Most of the time i'd be able to pay off the cost of the lot by flogging some of the tanks/big monsters/new on sprue bits within a day or so. The rest was gravy.

The best of these was when some guys getting payed to do a house clearance called me up to empty an entire hobby room for them.
I payed them £100 for stuff that would otherwise have been going in the skip. Praetorians, Inquisitor, Necromunda, Dogs of War, 4 tables worth of terrain, books, full painted and nos armies the guy had good taste.

I'd get lots of stuff just given to me too.
'Hey I was gonna throw this junk out, I don't use it anymore and would rather someone made good use out of it.'
'Okay so how much do you want for it?'
'What? So it's still worth money? Nah, don't worry about it, just happy to see it go to a good home.'
Those guys normally left happily with enough cash for a slap up meal and were none the wiser to me swimming in my Scrooge McDuck money bin that evening.

Then there was the time that GW got rid of it's scratch built terrain and oop models from all stores. Ahhhh, great days.

My only real awesome deal was one a kindly dakka member gave me on some old OOP starship trooper MI. The movie styled ones are almost impossible to find, and I lucked into 40 of them. I keep hoping the Starship trooper line gets a new game, but in the meantime they're getting some games in with a local Tyranid player

They look really cool but are a pain to paint. I've had like 4 different goes at them and just can't get them how I want. They'll look excellent if I can just figure out that color scheme.

 timetowaste85 wrote:
Read the thread I just started under this one...it's all there.


That's not intended to sound rude-sorry if it did.

not at all!! That was a sympathy-"whatwhatwhat" What a total bummer... Sorry to hear of your loss, but at least (as you note) it was on the order of a few dozen bucks, not a few hundred... Or more!


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 Alex Kolodotschko wrote:

The best of these was when some guys getting payed to do a house clearance called me up to empty an entire hobby room for them.
I payed them £100 for stuff that would otherwise have been going in the skip. Praetorians, Inquisitor, Necromunda, Dogs of War, 4 tables worth of terrain, books, full painted and nos armies the guy had good taste.

Wow!! Sounds like you just got your retirement fund on that one!!

This isn't quite recent, but I found a lot of RT era tanks and SoB immolators on eBay (3 rhinos and 2 immos) for $120. That's pretty solid, but what made it great was a couple days after I won the auction, I got a message from the seller saying that the shipping costs were nowhere near close to eBay's estimate, and that he was refunding me $30.

Picked up an Armor Cast Warhound titan with 3 arms for $100. Other than needing a bit of paint removal I think it's a pretty solid score.

This isn't a huge deal but I picked up 8 NOS SM bikes for $90 from a guy locally.

Saved me $72.72 after tax which is still pretty nice.

 MrFlutterPie wrote:
This isn't a huge deal but I picked up 8 NOS SM bikes for $90 from a guy locally.

Saved me $72.72 after tax which is still pretty nice.

Umm. 3 SM Bikes are $40. So 8 SM Bikes are 106.66. Still a good deal, but not $72.72 off.

This was an incredible deal, I was planning on bidding on it but he ended it a couple of days early.

I reckon the DoW stuff alone would be worth at least £100

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Warhammer-Various-Figures-and-Books-/251312809864?_trksid=p2047675.l2557&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEWAX%3AIT&nma=true&si=Z5vXZkr2oj45y%252FMi3m3nc3koif8%253D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc

Nothing great, but I scored a squad (5) of OOP metal SM scouts for six bucks on the 'Bay. Still looking for the "Big Score", I know it's out there!

I'll just go ahead and DOMINATE this thread, with my awesome muscles and big fat braggart mouth, by putting this here explaining my 'lucky find'. It is all 100% true.

Around 6 months ago (that's recently, I'd say), I finished my shift at work, the gym, eating, then I try to lay down and sleep. Before I nod off though, I decided to check my Kijiji page (a local trading site, can find almost everything on here). I have the page bookmarked to auto-search the term 'Warhammer', to only show results related to Warhammer Fantasy/40K - anything with the keyword in it.

I see an ad posted less than 2 minutes prior saying 'URGENT - FREE - WARHAMMER MODELS, FIRST TO RESPOND GETS IT ALL'.

I quickly text message the fellow and he says I won the race, but he lives about 1 hour away from me (at this point I was adamant he'd decline my request and wait for the next dummy). I tell him "I'll pay you to drive the models to me!", he says "No worries, happy to drive them to you". I'm quite happy at the moment. I don't really care what the items are, I can always use items for conversions/trade with friends/sell, etc.

So a couple of hours go by, and the guy messages me saying he is close by. He still hasn't given me any details, as he sounded as if he was in a rush and I'm not going to risk annoying him into reconsidering. I was expecting maybe a couple of regiments of something, or a squad or two from 40K or whatnot.

He arrives, and the guy unloads all THIS from his car:



My jaw absolutely dropped. Within one of the boxes there were all these:



Every case is LOADED to capacity with models. One case is chock FULL of a DKOK army!! The other cases have an embarrassing amount of IG models and Catachan models. Tons of sentinels and weapons teams in particular. One of the boxes contains the last 4 editions of rulebooks from both game systems, and the codexes/army books for all the armies he gave me. A bunch of LotR crap too, but that will likely be tossed, can't give that stuff away, lol.

The other boxes contained a TON of models all carefully wrapped, it appears to be a very large Orcs & Goblins army (many brand new/on sprue still), a large Tomb Kings army, and an enormous - ENORMOUS Imperial Guard/DKOK army:



Yes, that's a Baneblade.

One other box contained a whole lot of very high quality scenery. Some of it is official GW stuff (old OOP trees, modular hills, bunkers, etc), but the prettiest piece imo was this:



The Warhammer fortress. I've never owned one before since I'm not into Fantasy, but I may consider using the Tomb King army, or the O&G army now.

He also gave me his tool/hobby kit which contains many of the Citadel hobby tools/supplies, and a ton of basing material, mainly static grass and flock, some sand and tiny rocks.

There was also a VERY old Citadel Miniatures dwarf boxed set. The box it is in doesn't identify what the contents exactly are, it's just a bunch (52 in total) pewter dwarves that are Copyrighted in 1984, and the solid bases are signed by a guy named 'Ansell', Bryan Ansell, the dude who would later own GW.


These are the models with 'Ansell 84' carved into the solid base.












Lots of books and tons of WD back issues.

As you can imagine, I was one lucky son of a dirty old rat.

Words can't explain how lucky you are.