Here’s the list, straight off Warhammer Community. Shield Captain. Custodian Guard Sodality. Sentinel Guard Sodality. Venatari Sodality. Custodian Dreadnought. Telemon Heavy Dreadnought. Gyrfalcon Jetbike Sodality. Pallas Grav-attack. Caladius Grav-tank. Caladius Annihilator. Coronus Grav-carrier. Eleven Custodes kits, all getting new boxes, and every one of those boxes is going to carry the Warhammer 40,000 logo and the Warhammer: The Horus Heresy logo side by side.
The packaging is the bit I keep going back to, over the codex and the rescale and the Aquilon Terminators that everyone spent Friday night screenshotting.
GW has done this once before. The Custodes Support Battle Group last year was the first box they ever printed both logos on, and I wrote about the Pallas in it at the time without really clocking what the box art was doing. One box you could write off as an experiment. Eleven going out at once alongside the codex means somebody signed it off as how the range works now.
What a dual logo is actually claiming
Every other range in GW’s catalogue has to pick. A Legion Tactical Squad in MkIV plate is a Horus Heresy kit. An Intercessor squad is a 40K kit. You can absolutely put the Heresy marines on a 40K table and nobody at my club would stop you, but the box doesn’t invite it, because the fiction has ten thousand years of gene-seed drift, doctrine rewrites and the entire Primaris project sitting between those two models. Those are two different organisations recruiting two different kinds of soldier, and the box tells you which one you’re holding.
The Custodes box doesn’t have that problem, and the reason is genuinely strange when you sit with it. A Custodian who fought at the Siege of Terra and a Custodian standing in the Sanctum Imperialis in M42 can be the same individual. The armour on the sprue is the armour he was issued, and he’s still wearing it, because he never died and it never wore out.
So the two logos are making a claim about the specific warrior in the box.
Or. Hmm.
Or it’s warehouse logistics and I’m doing the thing where I invent a design philosophy out of a cost saving. GW has been consolidating SKUs across the whole business for years, and a single box that sells into two game systems is a single box to print, pick, pack and forecast. The Custodes range is small and the Heresy range is smaller, and if you can serve both from one product line you do it. That’s not lore. That’s a spreadsheet. I went round on this for a while before deciding I still think the first reading holds, mostly because GW could have done the same consolidation silently with a generic box and chose instead to print both marks where the customer can see them.
Five centuries is the entry requirement
White Dwarf #519’s piece on the Companions is the one that made this land for me. The Sanctum Imperialis is guarded by three hundred Custodians called the Hetaeron Guard, and the magazine gives the qualification for that duty plainly: no fewer than five centuries of experience. That’s the floor. Five hundred years in before you’re considered for the door.
They stand there unmoving and unspeaking, and WD #519 says a single vigil has been known to run for up to a century. The Sanctum has never been breached, which I suppose is the performance review.
My Imperial Fists are fifteen years old and I talk about them like a life’s work.
The number that gets quoted most is from White Dwarf #427, back when the plastic Custodes first landed in 2018, and it’s one sentence: the ten thousand warriors of the Adeptus Custodes have not left the Emperor’s side since the Golden Throne, until now. That “until now” is doing the work of a whole edition’s worth of plot. It’s also, if you read it the other way round, an admission. Ten thousand years of the most capable warriors humanity ever built, and the line item under achievements is stood near a chair.
When they did come back out, it was under Trajann Valoris, and WD #427’s write-up of him is mostly a list of objects. The Castellan Plate. The Watcher’s Axe. The Moment Shackle, which the magazine describes as a device that halts time for the briefest instant, and which is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect a faction with nothing else to spend ten millennia on to have got round to building. His actual job, per the same page, is responsibility for the defence of the Sol System, which is one system out of a galaxy’s worth.
Visions of Heresy calls them the Immortal Guardians, which as a chapter title is either very grand or slightly sarcastic depending on your mood. Same book reckons a thousand of them, not ten, and notes the only time that many were ever seen in one place was Gyros-Thravian, where the Emperor led them into Gharkhul Blackfang’s horde personally. Three Custodians died. Their names were engraved on the Emperor’s armour.
The bloke in the shop turning the box over
I’ve got the resin Aquilons in a drawer. Bought them in 2018 off the Forge World site during one of those evenings where you’ve had a bad week and the cart just sort of fills itself, and they’re still on the sprue, and now there’s a plastic version coming that’s better in every measurable way. I’m not going to build the resin ones. I’m also not going to sell them, because I paid Forge World prices for them and getting rid of them would be admitting something. Pete has offered to strip and build them twice. Pete finishes armies. I have a drawer.
Anyway, the Support Battle Group has been sitting on the shelf at my local store since about March, and a few weeks back I watched a bloke pick it up, turn it over, turn it over again, and put it back down. He wasn’t checking the price. He was looking for which game it was for, found both, and visibly decided that meant it probably wasn’t for him. Whatever the dual logo communicates to us, at point of sale it also reads as ambiguity, and GW is about to do it eleven more times.
It’s the bleach bottle that says kitchen and bathroom. Same bleach.
Nothing happened, and the kit is the proof
Look at what the eleven kits actually are. Guard, Sentinel Guard, Venatari, two Dreadnoughts, jetbikes, four grav-vehicles and a Shield Captain. Every single one of those is a design that existed during the Great Crusade. The Telemon was walking before the Heresy. The Pallas entered service, by Inferno’s dating, shortly before the Burning of Prospero. The Caladius and the Coronus are Crusade-era motor pool.
There is no Custodes equivalent of the Primaris programme. No Belisarius Cawl spent a hundred centuries improving them. Nobody refitted the range, because the range was already the ceiling of what the Imperium could build and the Imperium has been getting worse at building things ever since. The reason one box can serve M31 and M42 is that nobody ever redesigned any of it.
Which is bleaker than the marketing intends, I think. GW is selling the dual logo as these warriors transcend eras, and the honest version is that they were sealed in amber the day the Emperor sat down. The Aquilon plate still has the same silhouette it had at Prospero because nothing has happened to it worth changing it for.
I don’t know whether the Sisters of Silence boxes get the same treatment, incidentally. They’re the other force that works in both games, they were in the webway alongside the Custodes for the whole daemonic mess under the Palace, and nobody at GW has said a word about their packaging either way. Probably nothing. Probably they just haven’t got round to it…
So yeah. The Ten Thousand. Golden lads, very good at standing still. Been in the game since Rogue Trader as a background footnote, got models in 2018, and now they’re getting their own codex with a whole range behind it. And the thing GW is quietly proudest of, going by the copy, is that you can use any of it in a game set ten thousand years earlier.
There’s a version of this I’d push back on, mind. The Heresy-era Legio Custodes had a caste structure that the modern Adeptus Custodes doesn’t visibly run any more, castes with defined jobs and the Tharanatoi drawing the Terminator plate for Zone Mortalis work. The Shield Host organisation of M42 isn’t that. So the institution did move, even if the men in it didn’t, and a box that says “both games” is flattening a real difference in how those warriors were organised and deployed. That’s a fair objection and I don’t have a good answer to it beyond pointing at the sprues, which are identical, and shrugging at the org charts.
The practical question nobody’s answered yet is what happens to the older boxes. Eleven kits getting new packaging means eleven kits’ worth of current stock on shelves in single-logo boxes, and GW hasn’t said whether those get recalled, sold through, or just quietly coexist for a year. If you were planning to buy a Caladius this month, you’re probably getting the old art. It’s the same sprue either way.
