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I'm one of those people that gripes quite a bit about GW's business practices, but I do give credit where credit is due. The other day, I picked up a friend's December issue of White Dwarf and paged through it. I haven't bothered looking at a WD in quite a while, and I was actually pleasantly surprised. There were cards for Cities of Death, Apocalypse formations, and a couple scenarios, including one for Warhammer Fantasy and one for the Hobbit. Sure, it was a lot smaller than it used to be, but there's actual gaming content and not just glorified advertisements with a $10 price tag. So my question is, what's the general consensus on White Dwarf nowadays? If what I saw is the norm, it looks like its actually a halfway decent magazine again.

Personally I like it, I like putting things like formations in it or cards in it. I get the ones that I want with the content I want in it.

If it happens to contain things in it I don't want I just don't pick up that weeks magazine.




However , you'll likely hear just more stories about the "good old days" and how nothing new can ever be good. lol

I think WD is better now than it used to be. Sure there aren't any real battle reports, but the painting articles are good, there are extra stuff (like rules and city fight cards) they've been putting in there and it feels like I'm getting a better deal for my money when I get an issue than I used to.

You get 4 pages of interesting content, another 4 pages of fun stuff to read, and about 22 pages of advertisement as to what new products are released.

Also that issue was just 1 week's worth of WD you thumbed through, OP. For the "December issue" you'd have to buy 4x WD, which makes it much costlier than the last inflated price when WD was still a monthly issue, and with more ads and less content.

its more or less the same, basically theyve traded a monthly issue of nothing worth reading because it was mostly junk (omitting the battle reports i miss those), for a book thats less junky, but costs 4 times as much as the old WD did (but no battle reports)

It's always seemed strange to me that they've always both charged people money and also printed a bunch of ads for themselves. Usually if you pay money, part of that goes to give you an ad-free (or ad-light) service, and you only get drowned in promotional material if the product is free.

It's strange that they're still clinging to a both-and model here.

At least they're mostly keeping the ads out of the rulebooks...

They have improved, but only in the sense that they now occasionally print the kind of stuff that used to be printed EVERY MONTH when WD was good.

The magazine went through a period of complete and utter uselessness at one point, but now there's a little bit of good stuff in there from time to time:

You occasionally get new, complete rules for things (models, formations, etc), which is pretty nice...although most of them should have been put in the rulebooks anyway.

You occasionally get cool stuff like the Cities of Death cards, but at one point, WD used to put cardstock inserts in regularly.

Codex Apocrypha occasionally covers something pretty interesting, but WD used to have entire short stories every once and a while.

The biggest problem is you get really abbreviated battle reports (which stink, compared to good ones), really abbreviated painting guides (which stink, compared to good ones), and these utterly useless, completely random 'minigames' involving, say, a $500 Smaug Model, a Bilbo model, and a pack of cards. Yes, I suppose that I could play this game, but I could ALSO play checkers using halflings and goblins instead of the normal pieces. Doesn't make it Warhammer.

I find some enjoyment looking at it (for about 30 minutes, tops), and it gets me into my local shop each week. I'm happy that the occasional really nice bit (I loved the objective cards, for instance) shows up in the mag, but mystified as to how they can't actually put more good stuff in there.

 Ailaros wrote:
At least they're mostly keeping the ads out of the rulebooks...

Have you seen the 7th edition rulebook? It's practically a miniatures catalogue. Craptons of army shots that have very little in common with the rule being presented on that very page.