Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Grey Knights by Robin Cruddace?


Well, the cat's out of the bag guys.  Grey Knights is definitely coming in April but we have no idea who the author of the book is.  Now.. let's look at a very narrow timeline of who wrote what recently for GW:

5th Ed. books:
Space Marines - Mat Ward
IG - Robin Cruddace
Space Wolves - Phil Kelly
Tyranids - Robin Cruddace
Blood Angels - Mat Ward
Dark Eldar - Phil Kelly

Somewhere in there, Jervis Johnson wrote Battle Missions.  I think that was between IG and Space Wolves, but honestly I can't remember.

Anyways, let's look at these authors' track records.  Let's start with Phil Kelly.  This guy is amazing and has written some of the best books ever produced in terms of fluff, design, cost effectiveness and overall power.  Mat Ward, on the other hand, has forever tainted himself with 7th Ed. Chaos Daemons.. which is the book that broke 7th Ed. Fantasy all together. On the other hand, aside from butchering fluff left and right, he also wrote some of the most balanced books for 40K.  Both Space Marines and Blood Angels are balanced books.. despite some minor oddities.  This leaves us with Robin Cruddace.  He wrote the best book in 5th Ed. 40K right now, his personal and favorite army, the Imperial Guard.  He also wrote arguably the worst book to hit the shelves since Chaos Space Marines by Gav Thorpe:  Codex Tyranids.  Needless to say, he can either go hardcore powerful favoritism or rush-job terrible spider monkeys.

Going by the trend of books above, let's make some educated guesses to who is writing the Grey Knights codex.  Ward looks like he's got a thing for Space Marines so let's not count him out just yet.  One could say that writing a book so soon will produce something of a rush job.. but if you look at Cruddace's Tyranids that came right after Kelly's Space Wolves then you won't argue.  The most likely candidate looks to be Cruddace.  He hasn't done anything since Tyranids and this might be his chance to redeem himself.  God knows that book was a major disappointment to the Tyranids community and GW would have to be blind to not see that.  On the other hand, we might just see a rush job by Mat Ward.. but that's unlikely because Daemonhunters needed a rewrite for a long time, and with an entire line of minis coming out to go with the book, I doubt GW would make it a rush job.

So what do you guys think?  Are we going to see the high-low bi-polar writing style by Cruddace or are we going to see something from Ward?  I'm still pretty bitter about 7th Ed. Daemons, but I do enjoy Ward's balanced work in 5th Ed. 40K.  I can't say I like how he butchers fluff, but game balance is more important to me because I'm a gamer first.  If anything, I just hope I don't get something overpowered like IG or god-awful like the Nids.

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