The Past

 A little backstory.

I started playing Grey Knights in 1989, when I was introduced to Warhammer 40k by a high school buddy who had just gotten into it, and had started collecting an Ultramarines army. I used the Grey Knights very first army list, which had been published in the back of the Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness book from the year prior. Back then you could spend more than 1,000 points on a single Daemonhunter Inquisitor to lead your Grey Knights army. Of course, part of the reason that he was so expensive was that I liked to give him a Daemon Weapon with a bound Bloodthirster, which could be released upon your foes in the middle of battle - the Rogue Trader era was a fun but crazy time to be in the hobby!

My first 'real' army was Space Wolves, which got their own bespoke models and army list near the end of the Rogue Trader era, and were the first faction to get a 2nd Edition codex. As you can read about in a separate post (A History of the Grey Knights faction in 40k), the Grey Knights didn't have much to work with in 2nd Edition; they only got a single Terminator Squad unit, and were primarily used by players to augment their other armies that were associated with the Imperium (i.e. Space Marines or Imperial Guard). So, there wasn't much opportunity to play as a Grey Knights commander for the decade from 1993 to 2003, when the 3rd Edition Codex Daemonhunters was finally released, five years into that version of the game.

When Codex Daemonhunters was published, several new metal models to support the faction were released alongside it. These were very limited, however, and only included a few versions of Grey Knights in Power Armor, and a few in Terminator Armor, along with one special named character, Brother-Captain Stern. There were also some additional models to represent the Inquisitorial part of the faction, which took up a decent chunk of the codex entries. Right away, I started building a new collection, fondly reminiscing about those early days in the hobby playing the Knights of Titan nearly 15 years prior. Eventually, I had an Inquisitor Coteaz and Brother-Captain Arvann Stern as my characters, two squads of Terminators, and four squads of Grey Knights in power armor (what we'd now call 'Strike Squads.' I also had two squads of Imperial Storm Troopers, using the lovely Kasrkin Troopers models, in support. Later, I was able to add two of the resin Forgeworld Grey Knights Dreadnought models, to get a little heavy support.

I had built a pretty sizable force, with which to play some games with, and this collection augmented what I was doing separately with my Space Wolves and Orks.

About 8 years later, the faction went through another major overhaul, with the release of their next codex in the 5th edition era of the game, which was released with a whole new plastic line of models. In addition to new models in Power and Terminator Armour, as well as a new character model (Supreme Grand Master Khaldor Draigo), there were kits for a brand new unit, the Nemesis Dreadknight, as well. Doing what a lot of collectors sometimes do, I had to have to new and improved version of the models, so I started collecting those, and eventually sold off my all-metal Grey Knights army.

At the beginning of the 8th edition of 40k, the designers released a brand-new, larger, version of Space Marines, the Primaris. So far, the Grey Knights have been omitted from having any Primaris models, and we're now 5 years since they were first released. The only new Grey Knights model that has been added in that time is a newer version of Castellan Crowe, and his new model is on the same larger scale as the Primaris Marines. New Chaos Marines are also on the larger scale, so my expectation is that they'll simply get re-scaled up at some point in the future, rather than have Primaris units added to the army list or to the lore.