Okay, I'm sure it has been 'done to death', but: I was searching in my spare room for my unpainted Gollum only to find that I'd misplaced him. So I went online to see how much a replacement would be - £4.10 direct order only.

Which is a bit steep for one figure but then.... whilst searching about Games Workshop's site I found these strange anomalies:

plastic fellowship £30 for 9 figures (those from the MoM boxed set) whilst the Finecast set was 'only' £7 dearer at £37.

The strangest pricing was the Ambush at Amon Hen set of metal figures 10 for £33. Yet if I wish to buy a Finecast copy of Aragorn or Boromir from this set it will cost me £7.10 each.

So buying it separately in Finecast (introduced because of the rising price of metal) leads to a circa 125% price increase. Most bizarre.

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"We may have cared about many things in life, but what will we have in our last moments.”
St. Teresa of Avila

Actually, £4.10 for one Gollum is a bargain, even a Hobbit sized model. The new Finecast Gollum in the Riddles in the Dark set is £10 (if you ignore the silly boat counter).

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My (more regularly updated) painting blog:
https://www.facebook.com/Pindergorn/

Bizzare is certainly the word for it

Some more daft price comparisons:

5 Litres PVA Glue
= GW:£212.5
= Other:£7

5 litres white paint
= GW:£958.33
= B&Q:£5.9

25kg sand
= GW:£1275
= B&Q:£4.98

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'Though my memory's fading, I remember two things very clearly: I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Savior'
-John Newton

Sometimes when you order it they will not send it as the web site is full of old pages that have not been deleted.

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Harfoots-The first of the Hobbit people to cross over the Misty Mountains and enter Eriador.

There seem to be some boxes and models, that have been forgotten by GW!

Mounted Saruman is at 12.5€ but pretty much every other mounted hero is much more expensive! Also the boxes of 5 metal Haradrim serpent guards are still there...

@Sid: hahaha I really laughed hard at that! So true

Lol! I took I while on the calculator to work those out.... makes you wonder how GW are still in business

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'Though my memory's fading, I remember two things very clearly: I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Savior'
-John Newton

I know someone once compared the GW static grass price with the price of pure silver-GW grass was more expensive proportionnally to it's weight!

But if GW sold silver I guess it would cost more than the static grass. It just seem so strange that the same model in metal costs a fraction of the price of the model in Finecast.

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"We may have cared about many things in life, but what will we have in our last moments.”
St. Teresa of Avila

I suppose one of the reasons the metal models are so 'cheap' (and I use that word rather lightly) is so that they can get rid of their metal stock? After all, I don't think they produce any metals anymore, do they? Or at least nowhere near to the quantities they did ten years ago...

Incidentally, I recently purchased my first items off GW's website (two metal blister packs, both about £8) and was pleasantly surprised to see a price reduction of around £1.50 on each blister pack whilst paying for my items. Is this only for metals? I think it was a 'merchandise discount' or something, anyone know more about this?

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Manners maketh man

When I went into my local GW, I paid £2.10 for each paint rather than £2.30, so I got a 20p discount. Do you mean this sort of thing, where it is slightly cheaper to buy in store than online?

I work in B&Q and get a 20% discount :p

(The white paint is rubbish mind you)

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Instagram @abbmodels

From what I understood from some GW employees, all the stores have actually been shipping all their old metals back to the UK to be destroyed. Man I would love to have a run through the factory they're planning on doing that.

Give them to me rather than destroying it...what a shame!

:O that's preposterous! What a waste!!!

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Manners maketh man

GW will make money on melting down the returned metal minis as it can be resold as bar stock for use by other manufacturers (and partly written off against corporate tax as a loss or charged as a cost of manufacturing - whatever is to their greatest fiscal advantage) and since they have an apparently greater profit margin on the Swinecast, that will appeal to the beancounters.

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Published ebooks:
Instrument of the Empire
A Note of Defiance
Phantom Ships, Ghost Flotilla
More to come!

They may also use some of the metal to keep producing the figures that have not been converted to 'finecast' yet.

Our LGS is amazing in that they keep an item they have already put on the shelf at the same price until it sells. Even as GW has been raising prices if they already had it in their inventory it stays at that price. So we have a few dozen blisters of metal around at good prices (though some are of course later acquisitions so the prices are more 'current').

Unfortunately they're mostly of forces I either have all I want of, or else not wanting to invest in a whole new army of.

Thankfully though, LGSs don't have to 'send back' their older metals.

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Wait ye the finish! The fight is not yours.
Beowulf

http://TacticsInMiniature.com

I contacted them about two weeks ago on pricing. As expected, no response.

If you didn't expect one, then why bother..?

Because he was holding on to something... That there's some good in this world

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Manners maketh man