Chaos Cultists

Chaos Cultists are a problem, and they have been for a very long time. This is a bizarre problem for the biggest wargaming company GW to have. Cultists are a basic infantry option for arguably the second most important faction in Warhammer 40,000. That’s like Warlord Games announcing Bolt Action and then saying they’re not going to be releasing a box of normal American soldiers… all your guys will have to be Airborne.

Back in the good ol’ days cultists weren’t as much of a focus for Chaos armies, so it wasn’t too much of a problem, grab a Necromunda gang, do a little converting and you can have a squad or two in no time.

With the dawn of 6th Edition Cultists appeared in plastic for the first time. These monopose cultists were around for a while, but unfortunately most often in a smaller 5 man box. EBay was really the best source of cultists for a very long time, puzzling considering cultists were the most competitive troops available for Chaos players across multiple editions of 40k.

Today we have two newer options for cultists:

It’s nice to see cultists getting some love after basically nothing for a long time, but I do have some gripes. Price wise they’re far too much. 10 Cultists should be £20, and even then that would be too much compared to other companies. Additionally their are no weapon options, what you see in those pictures is exactly what you get.

So I decided to go a different route:

With the proliferation of high quality and cheap plastic kits nowadays there really is very little reason to exclusively buy GW figures unless you’re tied to a specific faction that hasn’t got any replacements yet, especially when you can’t play games in the shops anymore.

I actually liked the bulldog kit so much that I’ve based my cultists on that using the Frostgrave cultists parts more for evil flavour (mostly head swaps). I think rather than cultists I’m really obsessed with traitor guard. So I’m not saving as much money as I could, but you can bash in the other direction if you so desire:

I painted them to match my World Eaters army:

And painting them took far less time than I imagined.

I do want a huge number of cultists now. Using the Frostgrave parts for flavour does mean I only need to get boxes of bulldogs to continue the cultist look I’ve got. I’m also interested to play cultists alongside Chaos Marines, it’s a rather unique aspect to the Chaos list that I’ve never used before (because of the issues with getting them).