From “What a Piece of Trash” to “We Need Gnawholes”: a Skaven Army-Building Mood Swing
We had one of those very Warhammer hobby moments recently: a model goes from completely useless nonsense to actually, this changes everything in the space of about three messages.
This time the culprit was the Skaven Warp-Grinder.
At first glance, the reaction was not kind. The immediate assumption was that it looked cool, sure, but on the table it seemed awful — especially if you expected some kind of shooting profile and then discovered it was basically a melee piece. In Warcry, that was pretty much the end of the discussion: if for similar points you can take something like a Jezzail, then the Warp-Grinder just doesn’t look remotely efficient.
Still, one thing was never in doubt: the miniature absolutely rules.
And then we actually looked at what the thing does in Age of Sigmar.
That was the turning point.
The moment it clicked
The sales pitch sounded hilariously over the top at first — all that talk about a masterful machine for manipulating space and launching unexpected attacks through gnawholes. The kind of copy that usually makes us laugh more than it convinces us.
Except this time… it was not exaggerating.
Once we realized the Warp-Grinder is tied into Gnawholes, the whole model suddenly made sense. Not in Warcry, sadly — that part stayed disappointing — but in full Age of Sigmar games, this became a very different conversation.
Because Gnawholes are not just a cute faction gimmick. They are a real piece of army infrastructure.
From our chat notes, the two big things that immediately stood out were:
- bringing back destroyed non-HERO Skaven infantry units at half strength near a friendly Gnawhole,
- teleporting Skaven units from one Gnawhole to another, as long as they are not in combat.
That is a huge shift in how we think about building a Skaven force. Suddenly this is not about whether one weird team hits hard enough in melee. It is about board control, threat projection, and recursion.
And that is peak Skaven.
Army-building lesson: context is everything
This was a great reminder that some units make no sense if you judge them in isolation.
The Warp-Grinder looked terrible when viewed as just “a model with a profile.” But once we connected it to the wider faction toolkit, it stopped being a dud and started looking like a support piece that unlocks the kind of nonsense Skaven players live for.
That matters a lot when we are putting together lists.
A unit can be:
- bad in a smaller format,
- underwhelming if you only read its own warscroll,
- but excellent once the full faction engine is online.
That seems to be exactly the case here. As we understood it from the conversation, the really juicy part is available in full battle, not in Spearhead, and definitely not in Warcry. So whether this thing is amazing or pointless depends entirely on which game mode you are building for.
That is such an easy trap to fall into when browsing a range and getting excited by cool kits.
Skaven design: brilliant, disgusting, and sometimes both at once
Naturally, once we started talking Skaven, the conversation drifted from rules to aesthetics.
And honestly, that is part of the fun with this faction. Some of the range is gloriously weird in exactly the right way.
For example, the Hell Pit Abomination is absolutely horrific — in a way that feels perfectly on-brand.
We also ended up comparing an older Skaven character sculpt that we really liked with the newer version, and… yeah, not every refresh is a straight upgrade.
The older one had that classic Skaven energy: dramatic, sinister, instantly readable. The newer version felt a bit more overdesigned to us. Maybe different paint schemes help, and we did find examples where it looked better than the official presentation, but our first reaction was still that the new sculpt just does not hit the same.
Older favorite:
Newer version:
Alternative paint schemes we checked:
Even so, the verdict in our chat was basically: better in other colors, sure — but still not exactly a knockout.
Where we landed
So the final verdict was something like this:
- Warp-Grinder in Warcry? Still looks rough.
- Warp-Grinder in full Age of Sigmar? Suddenly extremely interesting.
- Gnawholes? Completely changed how we saw the piece.
- Skaven as a faction? Equal parts genius and nightmare fuel.
We love hobby moments like this because they are a reminder that army-building is not just about raw stats. Sometimes it is about discovering the weird little interaction that turns a model from “why would anyone take this?” into “wait, this is the whole plan.”
And if we are honest, that kind of sneaky, overcomplicated, probably-unhealthy battlefield nonsense is exactly what we want from Skaven.