Games Workshop’s Big Autumn Warhammer Preview runs on Friday the 18th at 7pm UK time, and the announcement post has already listed the line-up. The next Warhammer 40,000 Codex, a new Kill Team, a long-awaited reveal for Age of Sigmar, new miniatures for The Old World, a Blood Bowl team, and something each for the Horus Heresy, Necromunda, Warhammer+ and Warhammer Quest.
The Warhammer+ item is almost certainly Astartes 2, since the teaser trailer has a great big “II” in it and there’s not much else that number could be pointing at. There’s also a golden banner carrying an inscription that reads In His Name, and the read Wargamer went with is that the banner belongs to the Adeptus Custodes. The same trailer has a flaming skull which half the internet immediately assigned to the Legion of the Damned and which, on closer inspection, is the emblem of Necromunda’s House Cawdor.
So the interesting line in the announcement is “the next Warhammer 40,000 Codex”. Codex: Space Marines is fully revealed already, its pre-orders open on Saturday the 19th, and it lands in shops on the 3rd of October, which leaves Friday’s reveal as the book after that one.
The Emperor’s first army
The Custodes are older than the Space Marines. That gets forgotten, and it’s the fact that should shape how their codex reads. According to the Visions of Heresy material, the first genetically and psychologically modified troops the Emperor created were his own bodyguard, the Legio Custodes, and their job was far simpler than the Astartes’ job. They kept him alive. White Dwarf #287 made the same point in the first article the Custodian Guard ever got, way back in 2003, in a paragraph that reads like it was written for a completely different game.
The old decree the Emperor is supposed to have issued over them is worth pulling out, because it explains why a Custodes codex is a strange artefact to begin with. Their lives are “forfeit to the guarantee of my physical safety,” he says, and then: “No other commander shall they have in battle nor in service.” No legion master, no chapter master, no Lord Commander. That authority currently sits with Captain-General Trajann Valoris, who carries a polearm called the Watcher’s Axe, a time-stopping relic called the Moment Shackle, and responsibility for the defence of the entire Sol System.
Everything about them follows from that. The Adeptus Custodes were never designed to be an army that takes orders and holds ground. White Dwarf #519 describes the Companions, the three hundred Hetaeron Guard who stand watch in the Sanctum Imperialis, and notes that each one is a veteran of at least five centuries, that the duty is unmoving and unspeaking, and that a single vigil has been known to run for a hundred years. The Sanctum has never been breached. WD #427 adds the detail I like most, which is the misericordia. Every Custodian carries one, a dagger that began as a mark of the Emperor’s authority to judge and has been used, since the Heresy, on Heretic Astartes as an act of ritual vengeance for the wound he took.
The ceiling problem
11th edition has spent the last month making Space Marines heavier. The new codex buffs their profiles, cuts the number of models in a typical army, and pushes sixteen Space Marine units into Legends to pay for it. When I wrote about the 11th edition codex schedule back in April, I said a Custodes book in the second half of 2026 was the safest bet outside Marines and Orks. Custodian Guard are still sitting at Toughness 6 with three wounds.
The numbers currently doing the rounds have Custodian Guard at Toughness 9 with four wounds, and Allarus Terminators at Toughness 10 with five. That is Dreadnought territory applied to infantry. The same rumours say guardian spears will split from sword-and-shield squads the way they already do in the Horus Heresy range, that squads might cap at three models, and that the book lands in late October or early November.
I want to be straight about the sourcing, because none of this is a leak. It’s a game of telephone running between two Discords, a Reddit thread and the Bolter & Chainsword forums, and Spikey Bits, who reported it, said plainly that they were sceptical. The claim that made me laugh is the one about the book being already printed and currently with playtesters.
And I’m not sure I want Toughness 10 infantry, even golden ones. I’ve played against Custodes armies where every shot I took was a rounding error, and it isn’t fun in the way people assume. If the answer to Allarus Terminators is a lascannon or nothing, then every list at my local store needs the same two or three units in it.
Then I go back and read the current datasheets, and I come round again. Toughness 6 and three wounds on a Custodian Guard is the actual problem. A Custodian shouldn’t be something a squad of Guardsmen can reasonably expect to delete with massed lasgun fire, and at T6 that’s roughly the situation. The Allarus profile is the one I’ll be checking first on Friday anyway, since Terminators are where the current rules already feel closest to the fiction.
What the fiction expects from ten thousand warriors
WD #427 calls them the Ten Thousand, which is the number they’re organised around even though nobody outside the Emperor’s inner circle knows the real count. Visions of Heresy reckons a thousand, and notes that the only time that many were ever seen together was the Battle of Gyros-Thravian, where the Emperor led them into an Ork horde the size of a country against the warlord Gharkhul Blackfang. Three Custodians died. Visions of Heresy says their names were engraved on the Emperor’s armour, which is the sort of detail a Horus Heresy novel would spend a chapter on.
That story is the design brief. The Custodes exist in the fiction as the ceiling of what the Imperium can produce, and the rules have never quite carried it. In 2017 they got a book and played like Marines with better saves. In 2021 they got Shield Hosts and felt like a real army with its own identity. In 11th edition their detachment rules hand Telemon Dreadnoughts an absurd volume of fire and put Allarus Terminators wherever they like on turn one.
I got a small taste of the opposite once. There’s a lad at my local store who has played Custodes since the 8th edition book and nothing else, and in 2019 I spent most of a week painting up a squad for a Saturday game, deployed them in what I was certain was a sensible firing lane, and watched three Custodian Guard walk through the entire thing. One died. I was in a mood about it for the rest of the afternoon, which is embarrassing to type out. Nine years that army has been around, about the same age as my son.
Spears, shields, and a range that’s already there
The spear-and-shield split is the rumour I’d put money on, because GW has already done it in plastic for the Horus Heresy. Custodian Guard with guardian spears and Sentinel Guard with swords and shields are separate six-model units in that range, and a 40K codex could take the same shape tomorrow with no new tooling at all.
That matters to anyone with a mixed squad on the shelf. Under the current rules you can put spears and shields in the same unit, and plenty of people did exactly that because the kit let them. If the datasheets split, those models become two half-units and everyone who built a mixed squad has to decide which half to keep.
The rest of the Custodes range has been quietly going plastic for a while. Telemon Dreadnoughts, Gyrfalcon jetbikes and the Pallas all arrived in the Support Battle Group, and the resin Aquilon Terminators came off the webstore only to turn up in a Warhammer Academy video, which is the reverse-confirmation routine GW has run for years. I went through all of that at the time, including the eight-year-old resin box still sitting unbuilt on my shelf. GW has said plastic Custodes won’t be Legends’d in 11th edition, so any kit already in plastic is safe for the life of the edition.
Hmm. I don’t know whether the Aquilons turn up on Friday or in the codex wave proper, and I’d rather not guess.
What else is confirmed for Friday
The Big Autumn Warhammer Preview announcement names a new Kill Team, which is the box I’ll be watching second. The Khazalite Holds are already spoiled, since GW accidentally published the new duardin faction to the Irish webstore over the weekend and then confirmed them in the announcement itself. Age of Sigmar players get that reveal whether or not the stream handles it well.
The rest of the slate is Old World, Blood Bowl, Horus Heresy, Necromunda, Warhammer+ and Warhammer Quest. Wargamer’s decode of the trailer has House Cawdor taking the flaming skull, Tomb Kings star players for Blood Bowl, a squig herd that could belong to either The Old World or a Warhammer Quest: Darkwater expansion, and a corpse starch tin that might be a specialist Astra Militarum Kill Team. The rune that had half of Reddit swearing it was Alpha Legion turned out to be the Dwarven Master Rune of Valaya.
Codex: Space Marines goes on pre-order the day after the stream, so if you’re still working out what your 11th edition army is, Friday and Saturday together will do most of that deciding for you.
