Which Army To Start? The Leviathan Box Set 10th Edition

Welcome comrades!

It’s a new edition, and it’s time for a fresh start. Sure, your half finished Chaos Knights are looking pretty spicy in 10th Edition and your Sisters of Battle are painted just right and ready to bring the Emperor’s wrath down on some heretics, but a new edition means it’s time for a new arm-me! Now, I’m sure many of you are wondering how best to take advantage of the new 10th Edition Leviathan’s Box. It’s a spectacular way to start any new edition.

The savings are legit. The models are beautiful. It comes with the rule book. In fact, I’m sure you’ve already pre-ordered at least one Leviathan Box already. Of course, the question is then, what will you do with it once you have it? Maybe you’ll start two armies? Or maybe you have to get rid of it as fast as possible before your partner finds out you bought another Warhammer 40k army box you never intend to paint. Regardless, for this exercise on how best to use your new Leviathan 10th Edition Starter Box I’m going to assume that you, dear reader, are 1) new to Warhammer or trying to get back into it 2) unsure of whether you want to play our favorite man-eating aliens or the Emperor’s Boys ‘n Blue, and 3) you want the best bang for your buck. Even if you’re not all three of these things, I’ll assume that as Games Workshop keeps steadily raising your prices, you’re at least curious about my thoughts on #3.

I started Warhammer when I was 12, but after spending my allowance on it for years, I eventually moved on to other things. However, during Covid, I got back into it at the start of 9th Edition, but I was interested in spending as little as possible because I genuinely did not know whether I truly wanted to get back into the hobby. So keen for a deal, but unwilling to simply drop $250 dollars on a box set that I wasn’t sure I wanted, I waited, and I watched. Here’s what I learned.

You should buy the Leviathan Box regardless of whether you want to play Space Marines or Tyranids or any other race. It comes with the rule book (approximately $85), 25 awesome new Space Marine sculpts including a Dreadnought, and 47 new Tyranid sculpts guaranteed to upset the children. Even if you hate Space Marines and Tyranids, if you sell all the Space Marines and Tyranids in the box on the second-hand market, you’ll probably get the rule book for free.

Everybody plays Space Marines. This is good and bad from a thrift seeker’s point of view. It means that you, dear reader, likely also want to play Space Marines by default. And why not? They are fun to paint, they regularly kick ass on the table, and they’re sort of the good guys! Those new sculpts look awesome as well. But the thing is, when 9th Edition Indomitus Box Sets were still available, people were selling the entire Space Marine section for $150 without issue on Kijiji and Facebook Marketplace. If they sold the Space Marines piecemeal, they were getting $50 dollars for the outrider bikes, $50 dollars for the blade guard, $50 dollars for the assault intercessors, $50 dollars for the Eradicators, and $10-20 dollars for each character. Basically, they could recoup the cost of the entire box. However, when it comes to the non-Space Marine races…

Nobody plays the non-Space Marines! Necron halves of Indomitus (9th Edition) were going for $100 or best offer more than a two years after the Indomitus Box came out. Some people still cannot get rid of them at time of writing. Part of the issue is that Necrons were off-meta for the majority of 9th Edition (they sucked, fight me), but the reality is that in general Space Marines are more popular. However, that’s where a clever new Warhammer player may find their niche at a reasonable price. If you sell the Space Marine half on Kijiji or Facebook Marketplace one unit at a time, you will likely be able to buy 1.5 to 2 Tyranid portions of Leviathan Box from people only interested in the Space Marine half. That means instead of 20 Termagants, you may have up to 60. Of course, you might not need three Tyranid Primes, they have great conversion potential, or you can sell them for even more Termagants (personally, I like to intimidate my opponent through sheer numbers and endless maniacal laughter). However, if you sell the Tyranid half, you’ll likely only get half of a Space Marine Leviathan force if you’re lucky. That’s not the end of the world, but that’s not good buying. I’m also not convinced you would ever need a second Infernus Squad. Or a first one.

Now, there’s more to the calculation that I won’t get into here. For example, we don’t know the points cost of any of these units in the new edition. Maybe 3 Tyranid Leviathan halves aren’t worth even as much as 1 Space Marine halve on the board. Maybe Tyranids’ dominance in the latter half of 9th Edition means Game Workshop will nerf them into the ground. Maybe you’re entomophobic or arachnophobic (fear of insects and spiders, respectively). I don’t judge.

Tell me why I should play Space Marines or Tyranids in the new edition in the comments below. I’ll tell you why you’re wrong.

Mad Doc