Vostroya never sent a regiment to Terra. When the call went out for loyalists to defend the throne against Horus, Vostroya’s officials wrote back saying they’d serve the Imperium better by making weapons than firing them. The Heresy ended. Terra burned. After that, Vostroya was called to account for it.
The deal they cut to keep their planet has lasted ten thousand years. Every firstborn child of every family on Vostroya gets pledged to the Astra Militarum at birth, no exceptions — common, low-born, noble, Techtriarch. The lore calls it the Offering of the First Born, and it’s the only Imperial Guard regiment whose entire reason for existing is collective penance. That’s the regiment GW just announced is coming back as a Made to Order release.
What’s in the box
The MTO wave is broad. The headline product is the Vostroyan Platoon: a Command Squad (Commander, Veteran with master vox, Standard Bearer, Veteran with medi-pack), 20 Vostroyan Guardsmen with two sergeants and a couple of special weapons, and three Lascannon Teams. Beyond that you can buy a 10-model squad, a separate Command Squad, three alternate Commanders (chainsword, power fist, plasma pistol and power sword), individual special-weapon troopers (plasma, grenade launcher, flamer), a sniper pair, and heavy weapons teams in heavy bolter, lascannon, and mortar configurations.
These are the original 2006 metal sculpts. Last available during the 2018 holiday Made to Order window that closed on 2 January 2019. Seven and a half years of secondary-market prices doing what secondary-market prices do. Painted command squads have been moving for $264 to $438 on eBay depending on condition. Lascannon teams sit around $45 to $50. Single OOP sergeants go for $25 used.
GW hasn’t dropped a hard date yet. Just a “soon,” which means the eBay listings are in a brief holding pattern while everyone waits to see what the platoon box costs. Made to Order reruns cool panic-buying. Supply still closes after the window, so the secondary market stays intact. If the platoon matches 2018 retail, sellers sitting on $400 NIB command squads are watching this announcement very carefully.
Why Vostroyans look the way they look
Most Astra Militarum regiments are flavoured by their planet’s environment. Cadians fight because there’s a warp tear next door. Catachans grew up wrestling carnivorous trees. Valhallans got their world frozen by orks and never got over it. The regiment’s character emerges from “what is it like to live there.”
Vostroyans aren’t shaped that way. The regiment is shaped by what their ancestors didn’t do during the Horus Heresy, and by ten thousand years of family-level penance for that letter. Vostroya itself sits in the Halo Zone beyond the Eye of Terror, swore allegiance to Mars during the Age of Strife, and was rolling out arms and ammunition for the Imperium straight through the Great Crusade. None of that is what you remember about them. You remember the fur hats and the engraved guns.
The hats are doing real work. Pre-Heresy Imperial Army regiments, the standing armies of the Great Crusade era before Roboute Guilliman wrote the Codex Astartes and standardised everything, looked nothing like Cadians. They looked ornate. Heavy fur hats, long coats with brass piping, axe-bladed lasguns, weapons engraved by the family that owned them. Strip the cloak off a Vostroyan illustration and the silhouette underneath is the silhouette of a Crusade-era infantryman.
Vostroyans kept the aesthetic because Vostroya was effectively cut off from the rest of the Imperium for long stretches, including most of Imperium Nihilus after the Great Rift opened in M42. They had no central authority telling them to standardise. They had a regiment shaped during the Heresy era, a planet that built its own weapons, and ten thousand years of “this is how we always did it.” So they kept doing it. There was no Munitorum standardisation officer driving in from Cadia to make them change.
Vostroyan society reinforces all of this from below. The planet’s ruling Techtriarchs are themselves Mechanicus magi sitting next to traditional nobles, and the population lives across seven administrative zones around the equatorial belt because the rest of the surface is too cold to inhabit. Death rates and birth rates both run high. The firstborn tithe never runs short, because there are always more eldest children. Saint Nadalya, the Grey Lady, is the planet’s patron saint, and her sacred text sits in every Vostroyan home as a source of inspiration about service. The whole planet is built around the idea that going off to die in the Astra Militarum is a sacred family obligation. That’s the reasoning behind the weapon-recovery priority. The weapon comes home and gets reissued. The Vostroyan it belonged to usually ends up in a mass grave on whatever world he died on, ten thousand light-years from his great-grandfather’s smelter.
Inheritance, and the part that nobody else does
Here’s the bit of Vostroyan lore I can’t get past. Every Firstborn’s lasgun, every officer’s broad-bladed lasrifle, every plasma weapon and heavy bolter is a relic passed down through that specific family. When a Vostroyan officer dies on the field, his unit is told to recover the weapon first, then the body.
The Vostroyans run regimental small-arms inventory like a noble house runs jewellery. The family back home on Vostroya tools the kit personally (they’re an industrial world, every house has factorum access), and the second-born child stays behind to keep producing the weapons that go out with the next firstborn from the family. Your great-great-grandfather’s las-bardiche eventually comes back to Vostroya, gets retooled, and goes out again with your nephew. It’s family heirloom logistics, like a wedding ring that’s been passed down for so many generations nobody can remember which couple started it. The pattern of lasgun used by the Firstborn is hand-finished. Some of it has wood or wood-imitating stocks. The hatchets and bayonets are decorated.
I haven’t seen this anywhere else in 40K. Vostroyans inherit physical objects across millennia, and the engraving on a Firstborn’s lasgun carries regimental identity that’s been baked into the sculpt since 2006. The lore is sculpted into the model.
I tried to paint a Vostroyan officer once. Pete (one of the garage regulars, paints Salamanders faster than I paint anything) found a Vostroyan command squad sergeant in his bits box around the start of 9th edition and gave it to me to use as a Cadian counts-as. I primed it, did the cloak in Cadian green, and the engraving on the lasrifle looked terrible. Stripped it. Reprimed. Did the cloak in red. Stripped it again because the gold on the fur hat went chalky. Third pass, I gave up and based it as a campaign objective marker. The little fur-hatted bastard is still on a base in my display case, gun and all, mocking me from across the room.
I’m bad at gold. The deeper issue is the engraving itself. It’s what makes the regiment legible on the table at a glance.
The same logic shows up in the named Vostroyan officers who turn up across decades of campaigns. Lord Marshal Graf Harazahn led the Vostroyans through the Fall of Medusa V, the 2006 worldwide campaign these models debuted in. Lord Marshal Graf Toschenko commanded the Nimbosa Crusade. Grand Marshal Durov shows up in Escalation with his own Baneblade. There’s even a single named lowborn officer, Maxim Kabanov, who got a field commission and made it back to Vostroya — apparently the first lowborn ever to do so in ten thousand years of regimental history. The Firstborn officer culture has historically been classist as hell. Officers come from noble families almost without exception. The Firstborn Daughter rule, where eldest daughters now also get conscripted if there’s no eldest son, only entered codex canon in 9th edition.
The 2026 MTO and the Guard moment around it
The 2018 holiday window landed in a dead zone for Guard. GW had announced earlier that year that the Astra Militarum range was being scaled back to Cadians, Catachans, and Tempestus Scions, with everything else either moving to plastic later or going off-shelf indefinitely. Death Korps was getting plastic. Steel Legion, Mordians, Tallarn, Praetorians, Vostroyans — all sidelined. The 2018 holiday MTO felt like a goodbye party for half the Guard range.
11th Edition is rolling out with Astra Militarum getting real focus. New detachments around Abhuman Auxiliaries, Tempestus deep strike, and Designation Force scouts. The Armageddon launch wave and the return of Yarrick are dropping alongside it. The Vostroyan rerun is landing in the middle of all of that, which is unusual timing for a Made to Order. Spikey Bits and Frontline Gaming have both flagged it.
I don’t actually know what to read into the timing. Both sites have floated “is this 11th edition setup for a Vostroyan return,” and I want to believe it. The same logic applies to literally any other off-shelf Guard regiment GW could MTO next. Steel Legion. Tallarn. Mordians. Maybe this is GW answering a backlog of “please let me buy these” emails before the window of usefulness closes for metal sculpts entirely. Maybe it’s groundwork for a 2027 plastic kit. I’d take both readings with a pinch of salt.
So yeah. Vostroyans. Old metal. Russian hats. Been in eBay jail since January 2019. Coming back at retail for a window. If the platoon hits 2018 retail, the secondary market on these models cools off for a year. If it doesn’t, painted command squads keep moving for the price of a starter army.
The window doesn’t have a date yet. Watch Warhammer Community for the cutoff and the price reveal, and if you’ve been holding out for these specific metal sculpts since the last MTO, this is your shot before whatever the next gap turns out to be.
