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All New Legio Custodes Come To Warhammer: The Horus Heresy
January 19, 2026 by brennon
If you were a fan of the men and women of the Legio Custodes before, then you're going to be a very excited collector with Games Workshop's upgrade to the army for use in Warhammer: The Horus Heresy and, by extension, Warhammer 40,000. Check them out.
Shield Captain // Warhammer: The Horus Heresy
A stunning range of towering new miniatures are coming for you to use in your games of Warhammer: The Horus Heresy. Unshackled from their defence of the Imperial Palace, they can stride into battle in their golden armour and smash aside traitors like an army of superheroes.
The Shield Captain is a sterling example of the new take on the Legio Custodes. A towering figure, with intricately detailed armour and an imperious stance. You could imagine a painter having an absolute field day with this.
A Shield Captain is a superhuman warrior but can't take on everything on the battlefield. To that end, you will need the likes of the Custodian Guard to take on your foes and hold the line.
Custodian Guard // Warhammer: The Horus Heresy
With their brutal but beautiful guardian spears, they are going to be scything their way through the enemy with ease. If you prefer your swords and shields, then you can instead bring the Sentinel Guard into the heart of the fighting, armed with their sentinel warblades and praesidium shields.
Sentinel Guard // Warhammer: The Horus Heresy
All of the Custodian and Sentinel Guard can be built using a range of options that allow for customisation and personalisation. You can go with lots of different bare heads as well as helmets, plus a command staff and your vexilla.
I like that we're finally seeing the addition of the female miniatures into the Custodes as well. Games Workshop have gone all-in and offered up the options for you to do whatever you like with your Custodes, which is great for hobbyists, whichever way you look at it.
Trudging across the battlefield, shrugging off bullets is very cinematic but what's more cinematic? Descending from the heavens on golden wings to crush your enemies from on high. That's where the Venatari come in.
Venatari // Warhammer: The Horus Heresy
The Venatari can be armed with kinetic destroyers and bucklers or the verutum lance. They are lightly armoured compared to their fellow warriors but they compensate for that with the firepower they can unleash when up close and personal.
Slay On, Even In Death...
Like the other Legions, the Custodes also make use of Dreadnoughts to allow mortally wounded warriors to continue to serve The Emperor. A brand new kit allows you to make some really, really gorgeous golden miniatures.
Contemptor-Achillus Dreadnought // Warhammer: The Horus Heresy
This set allows you to either build the Contemptor-Achillus or the Contemptor-Galatus. Both are equally suited to smashing their way through the enemy but one is perfect for dealing with heavy armour whilst the other can send scores of enemies flying with a sweep of their weapons.
Contemptor-Galatus Dreadnought // Warhammer: The Horus Heresy
They can also be built in some dynamic poses, so I expect to see a lot of people posing these Contemptors on the back of smashed tanks, crumbling ruins and piles of the dead.
Golden Chariots Carried Them Forth...
You can also get your Legio Custodes into the heart of the fighting with some new vehicle kits, including the Coronus Grav-Carrier.
Coronus Grav-Carrier // Warhammer: The Horus Heresy
Extra firepower can also be laid down, covering your assault, thanks to the Caladus Annihilator Grav-Tank. Armed with some seriously deadly weapons, they are a match for anything the Traitors can throw at you.
Caladus Annihilator Grav-Tank // Warhammer: The Horus Heresy
Do you know what's cool about everything that you've seen here? Not only does it look gorgeous but it's all in plastic. This means you're not having to worry about dealing with Forge World Resin anymore and can build yourself a brilliantly golden host for use in both Warhammer: The Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 (a full Warhammer 40,000 rules update will be coming later this year).
Updated rules for the Legio Custodes can be found in a new black book, the Liber Custodes.
Liber Custodes // Warhammer: The Horus Heresy
This will cover the Custodians themselves, the Sisters of Silence and the Agents of the Divisio Assassinorum. You will also find rules for two of the famous Emperor's Talons, Captain-General Constantin Valdor and the Knight-Commander of the Silent Sisterhood, Jenetia Krole.
Kick your collection off with the Legio Custodes Battle Group, which will be the first place to get a bunch of these miniatures before they are on general sale.
Legio Custodes Battle Group // Warhammer: The Horus Heresy
What's nice about the Legio Custodes is that they can be painted very quickly and look really good on the tabletop quite easily. You can also put lots of effort into making them pop if you want to spend the time working on all of the details. As superhuman warriors, you can also build an effective fighting force with a relatively small set of miniatures, too. A win-win?
What do you make of the new and updated Legio Custodes?
"The Shield Captain is a sterling example of the new take on the Legio Custodes..."
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I’m a bit baffled that the “on no, no females!1!” faction hasn’t cried out yet. Last time there was a lot of moaning to be heard. Or did I miss that part on the internet? XD
The chat during the live show went into meltdown as you might expect. I think the new minis look great and GW have put in enough bits so that if it does annoy anyone, they can just ignore it and put male heads or helmets on everyone. Big fuss about nothing from some folks…
Surely female custodes would be more dangerous due to girl cooties?
You mean the Custodia? Custodess? Custoniana? Custodissa? Custodrix? I’m confused now. How do we refer to her? What are her pronouns?!?!
Perhaps it was a bad week to release the figures 🤔
Oh boy they have. If you look at any form of social media the minority vocal right wing faction have been out in force. It seem that this is either all political WOKE rubbish or against the lore.
It seem the typical mindset from the 1970’s that including women is these days poltical. In 2026 this is not a poltical debate it is just part of every day life. It amazes me a small minority have regressed that they believe it is anything other than normal.
In terms of the Lore it seems they are very selective about how it should change. Aside the fact Lore is constantly changing. Custodes did not even exist in the early editions as we know them today the part they are quoting was only added later. They seem to ignore the fact it is all made up fantasy in the first place.
Neither arguement loads up to any logic debate not that you can have any logical debate with these people anyway.
The trouble is not the custodes players or even people that play 40k. It is the minority of people outside of the hobby who scream at you how much they hate GW but seem to have very determined views on what they should be doing.
They tend to drown out the vast majority of people who play the faction who at worse have no problem with the models or at best have a very positive view.
In my view we should all put females heads on all our models just to annoy them 🙂
I think I might just do that with the next batch of Frostgrave minis 8)
@redscope indeed – saw the vitriol from snowflakes yesterday. So much melting…
There’s money in outrage. Engagement equals dollars. Stay chill folks, save your anger for those people who insist on driving 65mph in the middle lane, not toy soldiers.
I don’t think there is any money in outrage when you are trying to sell a product – go and ask Disney, Anheuser-Busch or Procter & Gamble how that’s worked out for them… It works if you are trying to monetise news/op-eds, not so much for selling products.
I see a lot of right wing media say this and a lot of people repeat the lie. Have you looked at Disney profit or GW annual report. They have only increased both are making more money then ever before. I dont think this is down to any changes they have made but this idea go Woke go Broke is a complete myth.
It is not like you have this right wing media company that exists which is out peddling 1980’s style action films which is making all the money.
@redscope bang on. Don’t believe the side that says it won’t work, when the numbers definitely show it IS working. Evolution is a funny thing… but some cavemen will always grunt, and be left behind. Enjoy fire, we have a wheel now!
Well, the GW annual report isn’t relevant until next year. However I am not necessarily saying that this will have any impact on GW’s bottom line (I don’t actually think it will), only that manufacturing controversy doesn’t generally lead to increases in profits for someone selling a product. It DOES allow media outlets and online commentators to make money, but not usually product sellers themselves.
As for Disney’s annual reports, they earn quite a lot of money from a number of diverse income streams (not least of which is Disney+ which is one of the better value streaming services due to the entire back catalogue of 20th century fox films), so overall as a business they are healthy. But if you look at the numbers associated with cinematic releases against which there has been a lot of online controversy, the numbers are far from encouraging. The manufactured controversy and subsequent online arguments did not translate into ticket sales, they translated into significant losses and some incredibly high profile cinematic flops.
The problem for you is GW added the concept of Females Custodes back in 2024 both in written form and in warhammer + show. We had the same responce then, the so called go woke go broke. The same people who never played the games telling us they would stop buying things they never bought away.
What was the result ? Sales in both 2024 and 2025 posted double digits over 11% in 2024 and 12% in 2025. for reference anything over 5% growth in a company is considered to have an amazing year.
The same is true for Disney. I have seen many people make the same comment “watch out GW look at what happened to Disney” … I dont think a single one of you ever reads an annual report because they have increased profit by over 9% in the last two years. They made 35 billion last year. So what are you saying watch out GW you might make 35 billion !!
The problem is you are all stuck in the soup of right wing brain washing where you all copy each other saying the same complete load of rubbish which gets repeated over and over again until you believe it is true. Not a single sheep in the flock has the remote common sense to try and fact check what the reality is. Because you would discover yourself none of it is true.
You look back to the “you will not be missed statement” again we heard the same thing, people where going to quit the hobby, GW would go broke. Yet it never happened sales just sky rocketed.
You the poster boy of why you are wrong. You are outraged by a change to a company and a hobby you have not been a part of. This changes does not impact you and 1,000 like you making the same comments because you are not customers you are not the targets for these products.
Which is 100% why this will not make a blind bit of difference to GW growth going forward.
@redscope – solid points. Things are so bad for GW that they:
– are frequently sold out at release, and can’t keep up with demand
– are building a SECOND factory at the old bus yard in Notts, to keep up with demand
– have offshored some production to China (terrain basic kits so far)
Yeah, things are bad for GW – said no one who actually knows anything about GW. People LOVE to doom forecast for them, they have for the 35+ years I’ve been GW hobbying and guess what? They go from strength to strength.
They are the number one company for a reason. Doom? Gloom? Only for those who melt under the slightest pressure. It’s all so predictable, and silly.
I meant the anti woke outrage, that’s where the money is, the engagement certain people get by pretending that inclusion is the end of human civilization. It’s obvious that inclusion makes money, or it wouldn’t be a thing, and most of us aren’t bothered by it.
Outrage cuts both ways. For every person complaining, there’s a person stoking the flames – they’re all making money off it. But there is no money in that for GW and thus no incentive for GW to manufacture controversy. I am also unconvinced that “inclusion” in the way that it generally manifests actually makes money. The constant attempts by Hollywood to make their films “inclusive” by trying to appeal to the widest audience possible, has resulted in films that appeal to hardly anyone at all, hence we have seen so many HUGE flops in both Marvel and Star Wars, something that would have been unthinkable 15 years ago. I think there is a very strong case that says when it comes to entertainment, that actually it is exclusivity that makes money. A product that caters to the specific interests of a cross section of society will have some appeal and thus make money. A product that caters to nobody’s interests, won’t. Broadly speaking, when products are made “more inclusive” they end up being less engaging. Not suggesting for a second that’s where GW is right now, because I don’t believe that it is the case. However should they choose to go down that route, I expect you will start to see their fanbase start to shrink.
What you’re ACTUALLY saying is ‘due to the obscene amount of privilege held by middle and upper class white men in Western society, it’s more profitable to target them as a demographic for certain products than including other people, and I don’t realise this due to my own privilege’. The fact you go on to confuse product exhaustion with this argument just underlines it. Plenty of examples of inclusion have been profitable in the extreme, but focusing on niche sectors absolutely dominated by privilege holders is always going to give you this picture.
And the issue underlying this is that people of privilege are more psychologically fragile. They fear ‘losing’ their privilege so get reactive when people who don’t look like them are included.
@datreus Have you ever considered competing in the Olympics? You would be amazing at mental gymnastics.
I said none of those things, neither explicitly or implicitly.
My guy, the fact you stumbled on basic understanding of the English language is your problem here. If English isn’t your first language, see if you can find someone who can explain what that first paragraph means and how you misinterpreted it.
If English is your first language, well, not great.
@datreus LOVE your points. 100% accurate.
Oh let’s go beyond just putting female heads on. Let’s change the lore a bit further. Female and Male Custodes are allowed to get married and settle down to start a family. Mummy Custodian, Daddy Custodian and Baby Custodian in its grav-pram, all on a day trip to visit the Golden Throne…
If GWulla prices didnt make me go OW MUCH, I’d even go out my way to buy them just to put female heads on them.
At least all the internet man childs who can’t cope with their made up toy soldiers having a few female head options have made themselves known once more and therefore can be added to the ignore and block lists where they can go hide in their little voids of self induced range about their beloved “lore” changing in a way they didn’t like.
Lore, Lore always changes…
Could not agree more @jamescutts nice to see some enlightened people among the pitchfork and torches mob!
Oh no, GW’s release videos got ratio’d all to hell. A little dose of reality as the sort of people cheering this typically live online, while the people who don’t cheer it usually live in the real world, but ol’ James still can’t get the support.
My guy, the fact it got ratio’ed proves you got it backwards – it’s the terminally online incel neckbeards whining, the normal humans are out in the sunshine.
The normal people didn’t vote at all, neither thumb up or thumb down. That’s the bit you don’t understand. Those ratios only tell you the number of people who could be arsed to express an opinion – people who have picked a side, for want of a better description.
😂👍
Ooh the gold marine’s
Is it just me or does everyone else thinking DIVE for the Venatari custodians ?!?
They need Brian Blessed leading them.
Yes definitely Yes👌
I don’t care about 40k because I think all the factions are evil, but that’s not the point.
The whole ‘no female’ argument seems pointless for several reasons…
1) It’s a game with made up lore. None of it matters.
2) If you don’t like the models, don’t buy them.
3) If you are just playing with friends then ignore the lore that you don’t like.
4) If you’re playing in tournaments, be any faction that’s not human.
5) If you no longer have fun playing the game because of the ‘females’ then play something else.
What you are saying basically boils down to, Lore doesn’t matter and if you don’t like it don’t buy it. These are not good positions for a company who manages an IP to take.
Lore does matter. It’s the reason so many players play the games they play, read the books/comics they read or watch the films they watch. The lore is the foundation of the stories and it absolutely does matter; if it doesn’t matter, then why do companies invest so much in writing and maintaining it? I have no real skin in the 40k game, I don’t play it, I don’t buy the models and I never had any interest in Custodes at all. But if I look at various projects that I am working on – building fantasy warbands to use with a more generic ruleset such as Saga or Pillage – what am I doing? Am I just collecting random miniatures or do I have lore that I am basing that on? The answer is the latter – I am building warbands based on two settings: The Symbaroum RPG and also the Elder Scrolls video game series. Why am I doing that? Because I love the lore of those two settings. Lore Matters. People fall in and out of love with games based on the lore. You can argue whether that particular point of lore is or is not a dealbreaker to you personally but you can’t project it into the entire fanbase – that is a subjective opinion, rather than an objective fact. Likewise, the argument that “lore doesn’t matter” is entirely false – it quite demonstrably does matter to a great many people (in both camps), even if it doesn’t matter to you
If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. Whilst you may say that, it’s a dangerous position to take for a business – especially for a corporation with shareholders. I can’t predict what, if any, the effect of the backlash will be on GW’s bottom line. But I would say that openly telling customers to like it or lump it will almost certainly lose more existing customers than this specific change will ultimately gain them. I suspect this is a compromise with Amazon Studios because you know they will want female Space Marines. Female Custodes is likely viewed by GW as tolerable compromise, in so far as it probably allows GW to limit the damage to their product and perhaps even go back to Amazon and demonstrate the financial impact of this and then point to how much worse it may be if they made female Space Marines. Either way, a company should not really be openly telling people to either like it or lump it, even though fundamentally that’s the unspoken rule of retail; you won’t buy something you don’t like. In this particular scenario, where customers have huge amounts of brand loyalty, such statements will almost certainly be taken personally because people feel personally invested in the game (and the lore – see above).
Like I said, I have no dog in this fight. What GW do with their own lore and model ranges makes very little difference to me. But I do find the discussions quite interesting and also quite telling; the exact same arguments made for this can easily be applied in any number of scenarios (and frequently are) and they’re a very good explanation as to why communities feel so fragmented.
You do have a dog in this fight, you just haven’t worked it out yet.
@datreus no, I really don’t. I buy literally zero Games Workshop products. I collect and paint no warhammer figures and I read zero Games Workshop books. Neither do hate GW; I left their particular part of the hobby a very long time ago now, but I don’t hate them and I don’t particularly wish to see them fail. I also don’t think this is going to massively affect their profits either.
I really don’t care that they have made female Custodians at all. I wouldn’t care if they made female Space Marines either. Why? Because it doesn’t affect me at all.
You’ve written a slew of criticism here with a very obvious bias. You might TELL yourself you don’t care but your actions make it very clear you do. And I can also tell you that the fact you claim you don’t care is directly related to the stance you take. You’re the kind of person who claims to be a ‘reasonable centrist’ when in fact they are very much a conservative but know that conservatism is, to be polite, reactionary trash so they engage in – to borrow a term – ‘mental gymnastics’ to avoid admitting what they demonstrably are.
@datreus – I dig your vibe.
Not a GW player but I do have a lot of female figures ( Bad Squiddo Russians ) and all I can say is those female heads on the Custodian Guards are butt ugly . They could have made them at least 2 drink pretty but those girls are nasty . To each there own I guess
They look like what they are – overly butch female faces stuck on male bodies. Fairly lazy stuff really.
It is odd as GW does very good female figures in other ranges. But whatever. I don’t collect Custodes so have no interest in these at all.
You think so? My wife has barely picked up a Workshop figure in years since their female miniatures all end up looking so ugly. There are a few here and there that are okay but then you have stuff like the new Canoness that can only be described as a very masculine dude in drag.
Their women are so ugly that people thought that some of their new Space Marine heads were female…
I am still not convinced those heads weren’t an attempt to “test the water” with regards to female space marines.
I demand Misters of Battle
https://www.reddit.com/r/Warhammer40k/comments/10gtfxi/i_present_to_you_my_mister_of_battle_link_to/
Watching Games Workshop slowly self destruct is sad and at the same time oddly satisfying. This is what happens when you inject politics into your lore. Yes, Feminism and LGBT are political. The point of any Lore is to create a fantasy universe where fans can escape modern life. Games Workshop, by adding these elements to 40K and entering the culture wars has alienated half of their customers who are multi-generational customers. Why would any parent or grandparent spend their hobby dollars on something that is antithetical to their values? Men cannot become Women no matter how bad Mike Brooks wants them to be. Why do we even have to discuss this crap? They are going to own the Chuds until they are bankrupt. What I’m really wondering is what does Cavil think of this?
Ignoring the female captain for a moment, what is the point of the Dreadnought having a shield? Aren’t Dreadnoughts already supposed to be incredibly well armoured? There’s a reason knights stopped carrying shields and started carrying much heavier, two handed weapons. I just don’t really see what that shield is bringing to the table. Are Dreadnoughts with shields a thing?
Well I held off this one given the amount of chatter around it, bit I think the real outrage here in these made up minis for a made up universe have guns on spears or spearguns with no triggers!
😂👍
Much to my suprise, I really like them, the leaner profile reminds me of the old heresy card game art. I am actually tempted. Tempted enough to actually give the heresy rules a look.
Not something I thought 2026 might
Dropping off social media I don’t hear much of the noise, so I am going on that old fashioned looking at minis and deciding if I think they are cool.
@dags – I browse Reddit anonymously, and saw a meme about the hate – but it was a funny one; other than that, I have ZERO social media presence, and like you, I rely on Eyeball, Mark I, to judge my miniatures 😁
I like the direction GW is going, as the creaking overloaded shelves in my closet attest to, and 100% of my commissions are GW locals. GW is doing more than fine…