New Black Templar Emperor's Champion Announced!

And so it begins! As we all expected, and as I outlined in last month's post about it over here, the Templars are beginning to get their new models! 

The first of our boys in black to get a fresh coat of paint is the famed Emperor's Champion, sporting all manner of fancy beads and purity seals to show off to all the filthy xenos and heretics-alike.

One of the interesting things to note about this model is it's scale. It doesn't appear to have been 'primaris-ized' as most of us would have guessed. This honestly comes as less of a surprise to me now I think about Castellan Crowe's new model for the Grey Knights, and how he maintained his standard firstborn appearance, albeit with much more primaris-esque proportions. 

It seems as though Games Workshop are in no hurry to rock the boat by putting such iconic characters through a process that a large portion of the community disagrees with in-lore. Of course our new champion comes with the mandatory 'foot-on-rock' treatment we've come to expect. Either way this is purely speculation and, bar the topic of armour I will go into next, we have no way of knowing if this fella is Primaris (or not) until we see his stats and keywords. Onwards!

Another topic of note, it seems, is the armour. This appears to not align with any armour I recognise in the current 40K universe, despite having a very Mk4-looking power pack affixed to his back and sporting the iconic "ball thingies" that the vents are nested into. Does this confirm that the new Emperor's Champion will be firstborn, or is it simply a nod at his heritage? After all, my own converted Emperor's Champion, Reynauld, is very-much Primaris despite having the power pack of the original emperor's champion model. Again, only the datasheet will tell us these things. 

Honestly, I love the look of the new sword and, while it's awkward rotation and the helm's slighly-elevated laurels turn me off slighly (combined with the god-awful positioning of the pistol holster), I am super excited for this models release. On an extra note, to paraphrase Chapter Master Valrak on his YouTube livestream earlier today, "Of the three new character models, the champion is the weakest in terms of looks" which, if anything, lets us know that if this is the low tide mark for our next few releases, we're in for a hell of a christmas!

On top of a sweet new set of models confirmed, we've also effectively had our boxset announced using the new GW pre-order system detailed over on warcom >>>here<<< . Sweet!

Anyway, that's it for now! This was just a short piece I wanted to spam out to celebrate and give some small opinions. Keep your eyes peeled for that post about the Crusade system from the Warhammer 40,000 Core Rules, as well as progress on my own crusade and painting. Have a good day everyone. Cya!

Ryan