I was mid-argument with Pete about whether the Raven Guard’s whole “stealth is our identity” thing still makes sense in an edition where every Chapter gets Phobos options, and someone sent the new Space Marines infantry reveal into the group chat to shut us both up. It didn’t work, not immediately, but it did stop me talking about Raven Guard for a good twenty minutes, because two small details on that page mattered more to me than they had any right to.
Games Workshop put two new Space Marines infantry kits up this week: a new plastic Intercessor Squad and a new Vanguard Veteran Squad with jump packs, both landing alongside Codex: Space Marines in October. Ten bodies, any arms in the box, sergeant’s choice of chainsword, power sword or power fist. Routine stuff for a plastic refresh. What actually got me was two smaller details. The Intercessors box ships with a company back banner, the first time one’s turned up in an Intercessors kit, ever. And the Vanguard Veterans get their combat shields back, after going without since the squad’s return in the Armageddon boxed set.
The actual headline is the new codex, the stat bumps, the fact that basic Marines are apparently getting punchier across the board. I’ve spent more time looking at a photo of a scrap of painted plastic hanging off a sergeant’s backpack than I have thinking about Strength 6 bolt rifles, so that’s what we’re doing today.
The back banner nobody expected in an Intercessors box
Company banners aren’t new to the game. They’ve been around since the earliest Rogue Trader-era Command Squads, hand-painted heraldry on a pole that a designated Champion or Veteran carried into battle, part battlefield rally point, part walking scrapbook of the company’s victories. White Dwarf ran entire features just on individual Chapters’ banner designs, because apparently there was enough demand for that. The 5th Company banner. Mephiston’s personal banner. That sort of thing.
What’s actually new is seeing one in an Intercessors box specifically. Intercessors are the backbone unit, the one most 40K armies since 2017 are built around, and for the better part of a decade they’ve been the plainest looking guys in the army. Solid Mk X Tacticus armour, clean lines, no capes, no trophies, no banners. The ornamentation crept back in gradually through specialist units, Bladeguard got their tabards, Sternguard got their trim, but the standard Intercessor squad stayed spartan. Now the most basic troop choice in the codex gets a full company banner sergeant option.
I genuinely don’t know why it took this long. Maybe it was a production thing, a banner is an extra sprue part that has to survive being cast thin and not warp in the box. Maybe it was a design language choice, the first wave of Primaris was deliberately built to look efficient and mass-produced next to the ornate old Firstborn Chapters, a visual signal that these were factory Marines from Cawl’s gene-vats rather than veterans dripping in a thousand years of battle honours. I’ve read three different explanations from three different people and I’m not convinced any of them are the real one, or that GW has ever actually said.
I picked up an old metal Veteran Sergeant with a banner at a car boot sale about twelve years ago, still in its Rogue Trader-era pose, one arm raised, the pole bent slightly where whoever owned it before me had clearly dropped it at least once. The paint job was rough, thick coats, no washes, the kind of scheme you’d see on an eBay “bulk lot, as is” listing today. I never used it in a game. It sat on a shelf for years because I didn’t have a squad to attach it to and didn’t want to strip forty-year-old paint off something that felt, I don’t know, like it belonged to someone else’s army even after I’d bought it.
And now I’m sitting here slightly annoyed that the new banner sergeant is going to look better painted by GW’s studio team in a preview photo than anything I could manage on a Tuesday night, which is a genuinely stupid thing to be annoyed about but here we are.
Here’s my actual hesitation with the banner coming back, and I want to sit with it for a second before I talk myself out of it. Primaris Marines are built around mobility. Jump packs, Phobos infiltration, Repulsor transports, the whole doctrine leans into speed and flexibility that the old Firstborn Chapters didn’t have. A banner is, structurally, a flag on a stick. It’s not aerodynamic. It doesn’t do anything for the guy carrying it except make him a more visible target and slightly slower to reposition. There’s a version of this argument where the banner disappearing was deliberate, the plainness matching the doctrine rather than the studio simply forgetting about it.
But I don’t actually buy that as the reason it’s back now either, because nothing about the new Intercessor kit’s actual stats or role has changed to justify reintroducing decorative overhead. I think it’s simpler than that. I think enough people complained on forums and in comment sections for enough years that someone in the studio decided the plainness had gone too far, and a company banner is cheap goodwill. Fair enough, if that’s what it took to get it back on the sprue.
Vanguard Veterans and the shield everyone forgot they’d lost
Vanguard Veterans are First Company. Every model in that unit has already served, usually for decades, in an Assault Squad before getting promoted into the Chapter’s most elite formation, the one most Chapters call something like the captain’s Iron Fist. They’re close-combat specialists who use jump packs to get into melee range faster than anything else in the army, which is a role that sounds simple until you remember it means they’re expected to land in the middle of the enemy line alone and survive long enough to matter.
The combat shield is a small piece of kit for that job, a compact defensive plate strapped to the forearm that adds a bit of survivability without slowing anyone down or interfering with the sword or axe in the other hand. When the squad came back in the Armageddon boxed set, that option was just missing. Every veteran in the box had a weapon in each hand instead, with no explanation given anywhere in the reveal, and enough people noticed that Warhammer Community basically had to acknowledge the fix directly in this week’s article.
So yeah. Combat shields. Small thing, I know. But it’s the kind of small thing that actually mattered to how the unit reads on the table. A Vanguard Veteran without a shield option reads one degree closer to a re-skinned Assault Intercessor, and First Company veterans are supposed to look like something else entirely. Heavier, older, more decorated, carrying wargear that’s been fought over and handed down rather than issued fresh out of an armoury.
There’s a bit of Fandom lore trivia I keep coming back to on this, which is that a Vanguard Veteran who comes back from the field without his weapon is apparently subject to his Chapter’s rites of penance. These aren’t standard-issue bolters, they’re ancient relic weapons, heirlooms with names and histories, and losing one is treated as close to a disgrace. I don’t know if that extends to the shield specifically in any codex I’ve actually read. Probably not, honestly, it reads more like fluff text than a hard rule.
Pete’s Salamanders have run Vanguard Veterans on and off since before I started this hobby seriously, and the one game I remember clearly, he lost the whole squad to overwatch fire before they even got a swing in, jump packs make you a big juicy target coming in, and I laughed about it for a solid month. He’ll bring it up again if I don’t mention it here, so, mentioning it here.
There’s also just something a bit funny about a fifteen-year-old feature quietly disappearing and then coming back with a press release treating it as a correction. Like when a chain restaurant discontinues a menu item, gets complaints for two years, then relaunches it as a limited-time “fan favourite is back” event. Nobody at the studio actually wanted the shield gone, it just fell out of a production pipeline somewhere and nobody higher up flagged it until enough customers did.
I’ll admit I’m the exact target audience for this kind of “we fixed the thing you complained about” marketing, because I complain about GW’s pricing constantly and then buy the kit on release day anyway. It’s not a good look. I’m aware it’s not a good look.
What this actually changes on the table
None of this is really about points values or detachment synergy, not yet anyway, nobody’s seen the actual Codex: Space Marines datasheets for either unit. It’s about two units getting their identity back after a stretch where the plastic didn’t quite match the lore description. The Space Marine Captain on Bike getting a proper release earlier this year was the same kind of story, an old-school option that had quietly vanished from current production finally getting treated like it mattered.
If you’re the kind of player who already has a shelf of First Company veterans and half-painted Intercessor squads, this is a good week. Even the most generic infantry choice in the game, the one every Imperial Fists or Ultramarines or Raven Guard army is built around, still had two small details go missing for years before anyone in Nottingham did anything about it.
No price yet. No firm date beyond “alongside the codex in October.” I’ll probably preorder both the day they’re up and then let them sit in the pile for a few months before I touch a brush to them, because that’s genuinely just how this hobby works for me at this point.
