The badge on the Games Workshop webstore reads “Discontinued – being removed.” That’s the whole announcement. No farewell article, no retrospective, no Last Chance to Buy page, because GW quietly retired that page a few years ago and replaced it with a small info icon you have to hover over. Hover over the one on the Baneblade and you find out that the biggest plastic tank in the Astra Militarum range is on its way out.
It isn’t going alone. Spikey Bits counted 44 items on the removal list, and the Baneblade’s entire family went with it: Banehammer, Banesword, Doomhammer, Hellhammer, Stormlord, Stormsword. One hull, six boxes, all pulled at the same time. There’s Age of Sigmar on the list too, some Horus Heresy upgrade sprues, a scattering of paints and clippers that nobody has bothered to mention in any of the coverage I’ve read.
Six sprues at $197
The reason people are landing on, and I think it’s right, is that this comes down to margin. The Baneblade box holds six sprues and costs $197. A Trygon holds one enormous sprue and costs $110. Injection moulding is dominated by tooling and by the volume of plastic you shove into it, so one of those boxes is earning GW about thirty-odd dollars per sprue and the other is earning a hundred and ten, which is the sort of gap that shows up in a range review with a highlighter through it.
The removal of the Last Chance to Buy page is the part that annoys me more than the discontinuation itself. That page used to be a courtesy. It said, in plain English, these things are going, decide now. What replaced it is an icon you have to know exists, on a product page you have to already be looking at, telling you something GW has decided not to say out loud anywhere else. I was in my local store the weekend before last and the Baneblade box was still sat on the top shelf above the Guard section where it has lived for as long as I’ve shopped there, price sticker slightly sun-faded on one corner, and the bloke behind the counter had no idea it was coming off. He found out from me, on a Saturday, secondhand, off a rumour site.
I went down this road before when I tried to pin down what a new plastic kit actually costs GW to tool, and the thing that stuck with me was how little the plastic itself matters next to the steel. The mould is the investment. A six-sprue kit means six tools sitting in a factory in Nottingham earning less per pull than the tools next to them.
None of which makes it feel good. The Baneblade is one of the loveliest lumps of plastic GW has ever produced, and it’s been on the shelf since October 2007, when it launched next to the first Apocalypse book as the largest plastic kit the company had ever made. Before that, if you wanted a super-heavy you were buying resin from Forge World and remortgaging something. Nineteen years on the shelf. That’s more than the entire span of my hobby life, and considerably longer than either of the cars I’ve owned.
I own one. Bought it in 2017 when Cadia was falling and I had convinced myself that a super-heavy would be the centrepiece that finally made me finish the Cadian army I’d been picking at for years. It is in the loft. Still shrink-wrapped. I have moved house once since buying it and the box came with me, unopened, in the back of a hired van, and I remember thinking at the time that this was fine and normal behaviour. Pete has painted something like four complete armies in the time that box has been sealed. He asks about it occasionally, in the tone you’d use about a gym membership.
The Imperium has the same problem
The in-universe explanation for why Baneblades are rare has always been a manufacturing cost problem, and Imperial Armour Volume 1’s Baneblade entry spells it out at length. I’d read that entry before. I don’t think I’d ever read it while looking at a discontinuation notice.
The Baneblade is an STC design, and the Adeptus Mechanicus guards the data so tightly that only a handful of Forge Worlds are permitted to build one, with most of the original examples coming from Mars itself. The book claims there were once whole divisions of them in the Emperor’s service. By the 41st Millennium an Imperial commander is lucky to have a company of three, and usually gets one.
So other Forge Worlds started building knock-offs. Imperial Armour calls them counterfeits; Mars, with the disdain you’d expect, calls them second-generation Baneblades. They look right from a distance. Get closer and the corners start showing. A true Baneblade fires rocket-propelled shells from its main cannon and a second-generation one fires standard battle cannon ammunition. The real one has a reinforced demolisher mount that lets it bombard while it advances, and the cheap one just bolts a second battle cannon into the hull instead. Worse internal bracing. Weaker engine and transmission. Downgraded comms and logis engines. All the expensive systems, quietly deleted, by manufactories chasing military contracts and trade concessions they couldn’t otherwise win.
The Imperium, in other words, has been quietly cost-reducing its own super-heavy for millennia, and the fluff writes it as a tragedy of lost knowledge.
There’s a whole layer of Mechanicus politics stacked on top of it. Mars holds the Mars pattern to be the only correct expression of the design and gets visibly irritated that Lucius builds its own version, which is heavier, more armoured, and needs a bigger engine to keep up. The differences come down to some extra plate and a heavier powerplant, and the priesthood treated them as significant enough to feed the schisms that opened between Forge Worlds in the last decades of the Great Crusade. Two factories arguing about whose rivets are holier, and it ends up in the historical record as a doctrinal rupture.
And the crew, while I’m here, because this is the detail I always come back to. Ten people. Commander, tactical officer, driver, an assigned Mechanicus adept, three gunners, three loaders, all of them stacked across several decks inside a hull with corridors in it. New crew start as tertiary loader, which is the job of ferrying shells around and covering for whoever is busiest, on the theory that you’ll learn every other station by being adjacent to it. Nobody in the Guard gets a training pipeline that considerate. My favourite awful boy of a tank has better HR than the Munitorum.
I want to be careful, because I nearly talked myself into a much tidier version of this than the facts support. Games Workshop isn’t the Adeptus Mechanicus. The parallel is a coincidence, and coincidences are exactly the sort of thing you start seeing when you’ve been staring at a webstore removal list for an hour. GW cut the kit for a reason that fits on a spreadsheet. And yet the shape of it keeps nagging at me. Both stories end up in the same place, with a production line that got measured against its per-unit return and came off worse, and with everyone involved quite reasonably describing what they did as sensible.
The variants are the sharper loss, honestly. The Shadowsword giving up everything for a volcano cannon, the Stormlord swapping anti-tank entirely for a vulcan mega-bolter and a platoon of Guardsmen riding in the back, the Stormsword lobbing 180kg siege shells at the ground floor of buildings so the rest collapses. Those exist in the lore because commanders kept discovering needs that a standard Baneblade couldn’t meet, and the tech-priests kept improvising rather than admitting the Imperium needed more Titans. All six of those boxes came off the store at the same time, on the same list, in the same week.
This has happened before, sort of
So yeah, worth saying. The Baneblade vanished off the GW webstore in December 2022. Whole thing. Gone. Reddit went up like a torch, there were threads asking if it had been discontinued, people speculating about a revamp, someone insisting it was going in-store-only. And then it came back. No explanation, no fuss, just back on the shelf like nothing happened. So there’s a version of today where this is a supply thing and I’ve written two thousand words about nothing.
What makes me think it’s real this time is the badge. GW has explicitly tagged the kit as being removed and put it on a 43-item list with everything else it’s clearing out, which is a deliberate act of labelling rather than a stock system going quiet. Still, I’ve been wrong about GW’s intentions before and the removal lists don’t always mean what they look like…
If you want one, the honest advice is to buy it now or accept eBay prices later, and I say that as a man with an unopened one in his loft who is somehow now considering a second.
The detail I can’t get out of my head is from the same Imperial Armour entry. Every true Baneblade built on a sanctioned Forge World is logged with Mars and given its own serial number and name. Its whereabouts, the war zones it’s fought in, its crew rosters, all of it reported back so that the fate of each individual tank is known to someone, somewhere, if they’re cleared to look. The Astra Militarum keeps a named service history on every sanctioned Baneblade in the galaxy. Yarrick’s Fortress of Arrogance was hauled off Golgotha and rebuilt by the Mechanicus for exactly that reason, and Yarrick himself, who has outlasted most of the Imperium’s institutions, spent decades commanding a machine the Imperium kept better records on than it kept on him.
Anyway. Mine’s still in the loft. I should probably open it before the sprues become an heirloom.
