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Hey all, wanted to get some advice from other gamers that may have gone through this. I have too many models. Plain and simple. The next buy for any of my armies would be casing, which would add to a very large stack of cases in the garage. When I started the 40k hobby, I took a very Pokemon approach to it and collected every model available for my armies.

So for example: I have Black Legion Chaos Marines, well I can run that with dedicated units to any of the chaos gods. I have 20 berserkers, 20 plague marines, 15 sound marines, and 10 thousand sons. All the names special characters for each and an entire army of god appropriate daemons for each including the greater daemons. Well all of this is 3-4 cases to travel with depending on what I'm using. We wont even talk about the 3 unbuilt fantasy armies I have.....

Now here is the question, do I keep my mountains of plastic? Or sell/trade it?

If keep, Why? and if sell, should I finish painting these to the best of my ability or not waste time and off load em now?

Thanks!

If you don't feel like you won't get value from them in the future by blowing off all the dust, cleaning them and repainting them for games, then sell them. If you feel like that you'd like to restore them, then of course keep them!

I have nearly 6000 points of Guard, Orks, Tau and Space Marines; I'm hoping to have the lot restored in two years from now. We'll see how that goes...

Hope that answered your question

G.A

Do you need the cash?

Do you need the space?

If the answer is yes to either, sell.

If not, don't.

Do you like having them?

Do you need the money or the space (as Blain asked)?

Do you want to play with those figures (again?)?

Do you crave army x instead?

Any or all of these may guide your answer.

I have a ridiculous number of figures. I don't "need" any of them. But I like having them, and I have the space. I can roll out pretty much most armies and most options that *I* like, apart from flyers and superheavies. I'm keeping mine unless the money goes down the tubes, in which case, they'll go for the most I can get for them.

Personally, I collect the figures, I would only sell or trade them if I thought I would get some serious benefit. So if I had say two of an out-of-production character I might sell one if it was worth a lot.

Just selling on figures from what I've seen means you buy at a high price and then sell low, so the idea of selling to finance the next project is really you sell for a fraction of what you paid to part subsidise the next project.

I will keep mine as long as I have space for them, but then as I say for me it's a collection not a money making scheme. I intend to build and paint them all and I will hold onto that dream!

I approached a similar situation not that long ago, and the way I handled it was by selling off everything. I sold off an entire CSM and Necrons army, Skorne and Legion of Everblight armies, and a Skaven army. I also sold off a large amount of new unbuilt models (many still in their boxes). I dropped it down to one army, and after cleaning house of everything that I didn't absolutely want to keep (I kept the unbuilt stuff for my Dark Angels, and a few assorted characters and such I like from each army), started fresh on a new project. It's important not to let a giant backlog accrue, because the cost (both money and space) just isn't proportionate to what you get out of it (which is looking at a huge mound of plastic/metal/whatever and getting disheartened).

I'll try to answer these in order.

Gen.Ann, actually had not considered reprinting them. First goal is to build and paint everything I have. With my improved painting skills, this alters what I'm willing to sell. Thanks!

Extra cash would help, and space isn't too tight yet.

Yes, but it will make me crave more i.e. Thousand sons and horrors make me want new LoC. Read above. Yes for fluff,and apoc although it would be very rare. I really want a 30k army, just couldn't justify it with how many unbuilt models I have.

The idea would be to clean house of models I'll never use. I have this weird fantasy I'll play warhammer fantasy in the future so I need a lizardman, empire, and vampire count army.

The pile is daunting, I just feel the cash would at least do something other than gather dust in the garage.

TremendousZ wrote:
. I have too many models

Weird... I understand each of the individual words you have used here, but together like that the meaning completely eludes me...


It really comes down to what you want out of the hobby. If you're just gathering bunches of stuff you'll never use and for care about, then keeping it would be pointless. Might as well thin down to what you'll actually use.

If you're in it as a collector, prepare to start moving into a succession of increasingly larger houses...

Blain87 wrote:
Do you need the cash?

Do you need the space?

If the answer is yes to either, sell.

If not, don't.

Or earn more money and buy more space Lack of money IMO is a bad motivation to sell miniatures, you only get a fraction of the money back that you put in to them and you certainly don't get back the time you put in to them.

I sold my first army because as a kid the money seemed good for selling them, but it was probably the stupidest thing I've done since I started the hobby At the end of the day the money was trivial and if I had an ounce of patience even as a kid I could have scraped together that money through chores and whatnot.

Sell them because you want to get rid of them, not because of the money.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

TremendousZ wrote:
If keep, Why? and if sell, should I finish painting these to the best of my ability or not waste time and off load em now?

If you're going to get rid of them, I'd say don't waste your time. You'd have to paint to a reasonably high standard to increase their value and even for a skilled painter that's time consuming work.

If you don't paint them brilliantly then they'll be worth the same or less than if you'd just not bothered.

In general, keep. You're not going to get anywhere near what you paid for it (assuming you bought it at near MSRP), so why take a major loss on each sale? I only sell stuff that I know I'm not going to get to, and there's a large pile of "maybe" things that I'm not getting rid of because I don't want to spend even more money if I decide I want that thing.

As for whether to paint before selling, painting a model reduces its value. If you want to recover as much money as possible sell everything NIB where possible.

Marines are hard to sell these days.
There were several box sets with lots of Marines recently.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Lack of money IMO is a bad motivation to sell miniatures, you only get a fraction of the money back that you put in to them and you certainly don't get back the time you put in to them.

I sold my first army because as a kid the money seemed good for selling them, but it was probably the stupidest thing I've done since I started the hobby

I cannot agree with this more. As a kid i sold my entire collection and from having returned over a decade later a large number of the models i owned are now OOP and are a nightmare to try and reacquire. I thought I didn't want them at the time and now... well I won't say how much I have expended to replace a portion of what I once owned as it'd kind of embarrassing.

Don't give up on your dream of one day playing Fantasy again as well. You never know that in another 10 years a retro games club might pop up near you or a guy who joins your regular club starts talking about a now obsolete Fantasy army he wishes he could play. One day it very well may happen and that day it'll likely be akin to reliving a moment from your childhood.