Dark Elves up for pre-order, and so are the prices!

Buggery.

The crazy price-hikes of the spess muhreen release have continued with the new dark elf stuff, £35.00 for witch elves!  10 Witch Elves!  Three pounds and fifty pence per model?  And are they made of solid gold?  Nope, plastic!

That's probably enough exclamation marks for one post folks, so I'll continue in a less angry fashion.

The £30.00 book is obvious and here to stay, and the magic cards at £3.50 is actually reasonable in my opinion, in line with all other magic card packs that have been released.  But £35.00 is insane.  10 special troops of anybody else's armies come in at £25.50, a tenner less.  The insane price can only mean that they're insanely good, but my top tip is to break out your old metal/finecast witches and whack them on ebay at £30 'buy it now', they'll sell like hotcakes.

Only slightly worse is the spearmen/crossbows/swordsmen box, 10 models for £20.  WTF?  A unit of 20 spearmen, totalling a probable 210 points inc full command, £40.  Four. Zero. Pounds.  So if you're starting out with the Dark Elves you'd best have £100 spare just to buy your core minimum for a 2k game.  Again, I think ebay will see a roaring trade in the old plastic swordsmen, and also I predict many boxes of high elf spearmen (£20 for 16) will be sold instead, and painted purple.  Or corsairs will be the go-to core unit.

Yes there probably is a lot of options in each box, and yes I understand price increases, but what have they been smoking?  More worryingly what does this bode for the future?  I had started to get optimistic with some of the recent releases, where although some prices had gone up, many had stayed put and others had even gone down.  And then that scenery package came out where you could save £20, I thought that the light had been seen.......and then the iron man marines came out (sorry, centurions) at £47.50 for three and the £18.00 characters  And now dark elves.  What price are beastmen going to be when they eventually appear?

I will end on a positive though, that cauldron of blood looks worth every penny, it's amazing, and beautiful, and many other words that mean the same things.  I particularly love the medusa, it's a really dynamic model and it expands the range of fantasy creatures in fantasy.

Anybody else incensed by this stuff?