Sixteen. That’s the number in the Codex: Space Marines preview Games Workshop put out on the 24th, and it isn’t attached to a points cost or a strength value. It’s a body count. Eleven kits are leaving the range outright, going to Legends with no replacement and no plastic. Centurion Assault Squad. Centurion Devastator Squad. Razorback. Predator Destructor. Predator Annihilator. Vindicator. Whirlwind. Stormhawk Interceptor. Stormtalon Gunship. Stormraven Gunship. Hammerfall Bunker.
Five more aren’t quite Legends. GW’s calling them “Legendary Proxies,” their term for a unit that loses its own rules and gets folded into somebody else’s datasheet. Tactical Squad now counts as an Intercessor Squad. Devastator Squad counts as a Desolation Squad. Suppressor Squad counts as an Inceptor Squad. And then, filed in the same list as three squad types like nobody thought twice about it, two names: Pedro Kantor counts as a Captain. Uriel Ventris counts as a Captain.
The Legends List
Legends rules aren’t vanishing entirely, to be fair to GW here. They’ve confirmed all of it gets added to the Warhammer 40,000 App alongside the codex, the same as every other Legends unit across every other faction already gets. You can still run a Vindicator at home, at your FLGS, in a campaign. Competitive events are a different story, that’s down to whatever the organiser allows, same as it’s always been for Legends units in general. The codex itself lands in October, and everything from the Strength 5 Intercessors to the Legends list updates automatically in the App the day it releases, so there’s no gap where your army’s rules are just wrong for a fortnight.
The pitch behind the cut is one GW’s made before, except this time there’s an actual datasheet backing it up. Basic Intercessors are jumping to Strength 5 across knives, chainswords and bolt pistols, and the bolt rifle picks up a second fire mode at Strength 6. Tacticus-armoured troops move to Toughness 5. The Terminator teaser floating around has them at Toughness 6 with Strength 5 storm bolters, which is the kind of statline that used to belong to a light vehicle. Points are going up to match, so armies get smaller. The stated goal is a ten-man squad of Space Marines actually feeling like the transhuman killers the lore’s been describing since Rogue Trader, something they haven’t quite managed on the tabletop for three editions running.
Razorback, Predator, Vindicator, Whirlwind, most of the Rhino-chassis kits on that list are sculpts that go back to third edition or earlier, given maybe one plastic turret update somewhere in the 2000s and otherwise left alone for twenty-odd years. The Centurions are the newest thing on the whole list and even those are over a decade old now. These are kits that were already old before I picked up a paintbrush, and I doubt GW was losing much sleep over the sales numbers on a Whirlwind in 2026.
So the Whirlwind’s gone too. Was never great. Nobody in my group ever fielded one, not once, not even during the edition where indirect fire was supposed to be good. The one time I saw one on a table at a tournament, the guy running it apologised before we’d even rolled for first turn. Still stings a bit, seeing it on the list. It’s a weird kit to feel sentimental about and yet here we are.
I want to believe the elite-but-few pitch, and to be fair to GW, this is the first time they’ve actually cut the tail to match it instead of just saying the words in a White Dwarf sidebar. Every edition since fourth has promised Space Marines would finally feel special again. Every edition, somehow, the range only got longer. This is the first time I’ve actually seen them delete something to make room for the idea, with real kits leaving the range to prove it.
Except I keep circling back to a less flattering read, which is that eleven kits going to Legends is also eleven fewer things GW has to keep in production, and that’s just good business. I don’t think that’s the whole story. Strength 5 basic Marines is a genuinely different game to design around on its own merits. The timing, right as GW’s clearly tightening the SKU list across the whole range, still makes me a bit cynical about how much of this is lore-first thinking and how much of it is just fewer molds to maintain.
I own three Centurion Devastators, painted in what’s meant to be Imperial Fists yellow, bought in a rush back when the Devastator Centurion Star was the list everyone at my FLGS was running, that stretch in sixth edition where a Thunderfire Cannon and a brick of Centurions in a Drop Pod was basically an auto-include. I never painted them past the base coat. They sat in a shoebox for the better part of a decade, through two house moves, and I don’t have a good reason for owning them beyond wanting to win games I wasn’t actually playing in yet. Pete’s never had this problem. Salamanders players don’t netlist, or at least he’s never once had to explain a purchase the way I’m explaining this one.
Pedro Kantor Counts As a Captain
The one that actually got me wasn’t a vehicle. It was Pedro Kantor, sitting on the Legendary Proxy list between two squad types like GW ran out of room to explain what they’d just done. Kantor’s the Crimson Fists Chapter Master, and depending which White Dwarf you go back to, his defining moment is either the boarding action at Melchitt Sound, where he led the assault onto the Ork kill kroozer Da Growla as a sergeant, or what happened after: Waaagh! Snagrod’s fleet dropping a strike that erased the Crimson Fists’ fortress-monastery and six companies in a single hit, leaving Kantor to march what remained of the Chapter across Ork-held ground for ten days to reach New Rynn City.
White Dwarf #288 frames the eighteen-month siege of New Rynn City that followed as the moment that actually defines him. He could have thrown what remained of the Crimson Fists into one last glorious charge and let the Chapter go out with its boots on. He didn’t. He held the city, rebuilt from a fraction of a Chapter, and by the time Indomitus rolled around he had enough of the Crimson Fists left to lead five companies to Vigilus as a show that they were back to strength. He’s held the office of Chapter Master for almost a century in the current fluff, about six times as long as I’ve actually been playing this hobby, and the entire character is built around a decision to rebuild instead of martyr himself. And now his rules are a footnote that says he counts as a Captain.
It’s the tabletop equivalent of a company keeping someone’s job title on the org chart while quietly reassigning their whole team to somebody else. Nothing’s technically been taken away. He’s still Chapter Master in the lore, still commands the Crimson Fists on paper. He just doesn’t have a datasheet that says so anymore, and I’m not sure GW’s done that before to a character with this much specifically-earned narrative weight, at least not without eventually walking it back.
In practice this just means you write “Captain” on your list instead of “Pedro Kantor,” and the actual model, plasma pistol, power fist, Crimson Fists heraldry and all, stays perfectly legal to field as that Captain. Nobody’s coming to take the physical model off your shelf. It’s two lines of small print in the FAQ that changed, and that’s exactly the kind of change that’s easy to shrug off right up until you notice it happened to a Chapter Master with his own face on the box art.
Uriel Ventris is a stranger case, mostly because I know him from the Graham McNeill novels rather than any codex fluff. Nightbringer, Dead Sky Black Sun, Warriors of Ultramar, The Chapter’s Due, that whole run. He’s 4th Company Captain of the Ultramarines, and White Dwarf #363 has him tasking Sergeant Learchus with cutting Word Bearers supply lines at Calth, which is about as much as the archive gives you on him directly. The novels are where the actual character lives, the court-martial, the exile, the long slow rebuild of his reputation, and if you’re wondering how that whole arc resolves, so am I, I still haven’t finished the last couple of books.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe “counts as a Captain” changes nothing for the handful of people actually running Ventris as their named HQ choice, and I’m reading tea leaves into what’s really just a rules-simplification decision that has nothing to do with lore at all… but GW picked these two names specifically, out of every character sitting on a spare datasheet, and I don’t buy that it was an accident.
This is also just the shape of the whole edition so far, if the roadmap’s anything to go by. Orks got their own Legends purge first, and now Marines are getting the same treatment on the way to codex ten. Chaos and the rest of the Astartes-adjacent factions are apparently getting matching statline boosts through the App before their own codexes land, so nobody’s stuck playing a weaker faction while they wait. Whether that holds up once the actual points costs show up in October is a different question.
My Predator’s still running the old autocannon-and-lascannon sponson mix, the exact loadout that’s apparently walking out the door with this update. I’m not stripping it down and rebasing it as a proxy for anything. It’s staying on the shelf exactly as built, Legends rules or not, ugly little brick that it is, because I paid for the kit and I like how it looks sat next to the Rhino.
