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When I say buying, I mean spending cash at a store/online or buying stuff from a previous owner. What are some weird ways you've gotten an army? Inherited it, won it, someone gave it to you for something you did, you traded it for other models or for something completely different, anything out of the ordinary?

I only wonder because I think I got my new guard army in a rather unusual way. While a small portion of it I spent cash on, most of it was gained by, get this, giving people digital hats. For those unfamiliar with it, Team Fortress 2 is a free pc game by valve that has a rather "unique" market, that being unique hats and weapons. There are all sorts of degrees of rare drops that I won't get into, but it basically boils down to mostly cosmetic changes that people are willing to spend sizable amounts on. Over the years I've spent around $150 on getting them, but have done wonders trading my way up in the market. In the end, I had around $900 worth of marketable things that I was willing to part with (saving some of my personal favorites) since I'm finally getting out of the game a bit.

So my choices then were, do I sell this stuff on the Steam market? I'll lose a certain amount to valve taxes, I'll get money I can only spend on Steam. Or instead, I can talk with some of my close friends on there that were looking to buy some of my stuff. I gave them a decent discount if they'd buy it directly from me, and I said "hey, you can have my unusual festive killstreak sniper if you send me two of the get started guard boxes". It was all people I completely trusted, so we did all these trades and here I am now, sitting on a near complete guard army.

I always try it out on vassal before I start a brand newarmy

You could proxy the army a bit before through down a ton of money on an army

I've been paid for a commission paint job with the models that I'd been painting.
I think there was some buyer remorse or a cash flow problem so instead of paying me the £600 for my services the guy gave me the £800 of models.
Not ideal but a couple of days later it was finished and I played with it for a few years before selling it on again.

Someone lent me their Dark Elf army for a couple of days, then fell off the face of the earth a week later having not come back to retrieve it.

I think his family moved away or something. We were twelve at the time.

The majority of my Space Marines came from a fifteen year old friend whose parents told him he had to get rid of his warhammer stuff because they didn't want that kind of toy in the house with his younger brother, who has downs syndrome.

Getting into 40K me and a friend traded in our MtG cards at a game store near where he lives. I think we put in roughly 5-6 booster boxes worth of cards and when we traded them in we got roughly $600 in trade in value for the cards. Basically we broke even roughly between trade in value and what we paid for the cards originally so it was a good value proposition considering we got a year or two of play out of those cards.

I have a Land Raider I borrowed from a friend who stopped playing soon after and just didn't want it back. It's a shame really, it's beautifully painted with a freehand Imperial Fists logo on the side. Would be great if I played Imperial Fists, or Loyalists in general

My first army were Tyranids that were given to me by my brother.
Was a nice sized army of 2nd Ed metal nids too!

Still have all of it aswell, but due to the poor nid book and limited selection of old models, its sat in a box at the moment.

A few years ago I bought enough models to make a nice 1250pt Ork force for a friend of mine. We lived a couple hours distance, but I thought it would make a nice excuse to hang out from time to time. He was pretty eager to play 40k but wasn't in a financial place to buy into the game.

So I secretly gathered up a bunch of models from ebay etc... all unassembled and unpainted. Threw in a pile of double paints I had, brushes, codex and rulebook. A couple months later Christmas came around and I said "Merry Christmas Buddy!".

To bad that his excitement wore off within a couple months. As far as I know he still has them in storage somewhere.

Inherited my brother's DE, which have slowly turned into my main army over the years (mostly since BA and CSM suck, and I don't like the way SW have gone).

My first army was going to be a hand sculpted Harlequin force back when 4e had experimental rules for it. My friends got bored waiting for me to build it so they all chipped in and bought me a painted army on eBay.

I've kind of had lottery-winner level luck when it comes to obtaining armies in wacky ways.

When I first started (6th grade) my dad started me out with his Space Wolves army that he used to play at a now closed game shop in our area.

I bought an old necron battleforce on the tail end of their old codex from a garage sale for 30$, all of it assembled but not painted at all in a beat up cardboard box, turned out to also have 8 metal flayed ones, 3 metal wraiths, 2 lords, and 2 spyders in it. I've since sold the 'crons, but that was the first one.

In my broke college years, I spent most of my time playing and converting orks, but occasionally I would drool over the mechanicus units that were coming out of forgeworld, which I didn't have a chance in hell of ever affording. When my roommate of 2 years was close to moving back to china, I happened to win a pair of close to front row Celtics tickets from a radio call-in quiz thing, and I took him to the game as a "one last night of murica stuff" present. A couple months later I got a package from him in the mail, apparently some friends of his were buying some of those special chinese discount forgeworld models you get on Ebay, and they let him rummage through the bin and basically take anything that was damaged from the, uh, factory. So I ended up with about 1500 points of mechanicum.

Then, pretty recently, another friend of mine moved out to Georgia (the country, not the state) and only wanted to take one of his armies with him. So he decided on the one that wasn't 60 pounds of vostroyans, and gave me those if I would paint them and give them back when he comes back in a couple years.

I’ve received some dumps of unwanted, unpainted, minis over the years. And a moderately sized brettonian army from a friend moving back to Texas.
I also had an old friend wave his rights to half an army we pooled out time/money to acquire and paint.

My Eldar army that I'd had for about 10 years got stolen from my truck. I had some Golden Demon entries in it and some really old models as well. Including an Avatar I'd put a lot of time into painting (and won my very first painting competition with). I was heartbroken.

My gaming group all pooled together their extra Eldar they had laying around and gave them all to me! I had a bigger army than before, I just had to paint them. Since the army was basically free I went all out on the bases and bought Micro Art bases for the whole army. Back then they had just started out and the bases were really expensive (I thought at the time at least).

I played with that army for a very long time. Shot the hell out of a lot of people in tournaments all over. It's still in a box upstairs, never to be sold or played again (I've quit GW for good).