Today we’re going to talk about some tips for buying D&D miniatures. While the edition wars continue to rage on, one battle front always appears to be on the use of miniatures. For the purposes of today’s discussion I will assume you use and enjoy miniatures at your D&D games and seek ways to improve your collection and their uses at the table. I will also assume you seek the pre-painted plastic D&D Miniatures sold by Wizards of the Coast. So now lets look at some things that might get you a better collection for less money.
Buy on the Secondary Market
While Wizards recently re-branded how they sell miniatures, providing visible figures in semi-random monster packs and fully visible player character miniatures in the D&D Players Handbook Heroes sets, the most cost effective way to get the exact miniatures you want is to buy them on the secondary market. Many excellent and reputable online vendors sell individual minis at good prices. At the end of the article, I have my own personal recommendations for these vendors.
Even when you’re able to see all three miniatures in the Players Handbook Heroes sets, you still may end up buying one mini you don’t like for the two minis you do. Buying individually may up the price a small amount per miniature, but you get exactly what you want and save money overall.
Shop around on the secondary market and get exactly what you want.
Buy Only What You Will Use
I made this mistake early on and my 14 shoe boxes full of miniatures shows the mistake to me every day. Instead of buying the miniatures you THINK will be useful, or the ones you think represent your coolest and favorite monsters, only buy the miniatures you actually plan to use at the table.
Having recently gone through the D&D published modules Shadowfell, Thunderspire, Pyramid of Shadows, and Trollhaunt, I could have saved considerable money if I had only purchased the miniatures called for in these modules. If you’re not using the mini at the table, you don’t really need it.
I recommend buying miniatures four times a year as you plan out your D&D games. Look through the modules you plan to run or the adventures you plan to write and make a shopping list of the exact minis you will need. Then buy only those minis in a larger order to save on shipping. The better you can plan ahead, the more money you will save.
Focus on Common and Uncommon Re-Usable Miniatures
The more re-usable a miniature is, the better value you’ll get for your dollar. Focus your purchases on common and uncommon miniatures that you can use in a wide variety of situations. Goblins, Kobolds, Orcs, Gnolls, and Human miniatures can be used over and over again. PC-style miniatures can fill in for main villains more than once and the selected undead minions can fill in at all levels of play.
As an example, consider the Infernal Armor from the Demonweb set. This 25 cent mini can fill in as a Helmed Horror, a suit of haunted armor, a knight guardian of some bad boss, a trapped statue; the options are endless. This mini is cheap and fits in dozens of possible roles.
When looking at miniatures, seek out the common and uncommon minis that can fill many possible roles.
Miniature Storage Tip
I have a few hundred miniatures at this point, maybe closing in on a thousand. The best way to store these miniatures that I have found are in flat, wide, plastic boxes. The flatter the box, the easier it is to sort through the miniatures within the box to find the one you want. The taxonomy I use to sort them between boxes is developed completely by the number of miniatures I have of any set. For example, Gnolls and Orcs go into one box and Goblinoids go into another simply because it spreads them out evenly between the two boxes. I don’t bother to divide them out since sorting through a single shoebox full of minis doesn’t really take that much time.
In Summary, the most cost effective way I’ve found to buy miniatures is to follow the following guides:
- Buy on the secondary market.
- Buy only what you will use at the table.
- Focus on re-usable common and uncommon miniatures.
Below are the best online web-sites I’ve seen for buying miniatures online. Note, I am not endorsed by any of these sites, I simply used them to buy miniatures or noted their good prices:
Cool Stuff Inc: Auggies: Altereality Games: Troll and Toad: This entry was posted in 4e D&D. Bookmark the permalink.
Good tips, I would add that if you are patient you can also find great deals on ebay, especially with lots of figures. I have picked up some lots that had a couple of figures I wanted for cheaper than the figures cost individually and got some extra figures thrown in as well. The only thing to be careful of is shipping and terms, I always check the terms for what payments they accept and how often they ship and I watch the shipping costs closely as high shipping can turn a real deal into a dud deal.
Thanks for turning me onto the stores. They should prove helpful in filling out some missing minis.
Great blog- I agree with your tips on minis. Good links too.
I keep finding myself returning to this article every time I want new minis. It is still the best advice around.
As I have been thinking in your direction I wuold just like to point out my opinion on the best way to spend your money.
The day before I read this, I did what you use to do, I went through the adventure “the scepter tower of spellgard” and listed EVERY creature from EVERY encounter. Then I looked up what it would cost on of the cheapest site if you would buy Exactly the right models.
close to 400$ . Which is totally unacceptable.
So I looked for ways to lower the cost, instead of iron defender, wolf and gravehound, I used wolves for all the three etc etc. You get the idea, I lowered the miniatures required to run the game as much as possible. still the price was too high.
around 140$
My conclusion is that it’s no use to buy figurines for adventures that you will never play again, if you don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars for each adventure.
Instead just buy as many random packages from secondary shops , like from trollandtoad.com , 10 randoms, three uncommon and one rare, for 9.99$
buy as many as you like without screwing your ecnonomy, then if you don’t have a kobold, so what, use a goblin instead. Another good tips is using warhammer figures, As I have a painted orcs and goblin army those units aren’t a problem, if you don’t paint, there is a lot of cheap units on ebay and such, not many people want to buy it!
Thanks for the advice and the links!
In regards to the above poster i think the advice of this site is directed towards people wanting to use the right mini for the right monster not those who feel “any mini will do” doing it that way is EXTREMELY easy just use pennies or cardboard with a name writen on it why bother buying the mini’s.
Personally im looking to run the scales of war 4th edition campaign ive come up with needing at least 700 mini’s including 2 of the most expensive ones the black and blue gargantuan dragons so far ive spend $644 ($144 for the dragons including the colossal red because why not, plus a random lot of 360 mini’s for $500 which didnt net me much of what i needed) personally im willing to spend another $1000 to get the 687 mini’s i need and once im done that i probably wont need much in the way of mini’s for anything in the future which is nice.
In the end if you want to immerse your players in your campaign your going to have to spend the money and lots of it otherwise just buy a bunch of commons and make due with what you have because theres nothing wrong with that either.
I agree about buying what you need and will use and even the storage. I just had to toss in that danddminis.com seems to be cheaper than any of the other sites listed. It’s advertising not all stock is up but what is up is cheaper. The pix are off the charts, too. If nothing else, a fine site to look at.
FYI, since it’s new and not finished, it advertises to ask if others are available and I did that. All of the ones I asked for were available but one rare. I got almost 30 minis total that weren’t up on the site, yet.
Happy gaming and collecting!
Thanks for the article!
The recommendation on the Infernal Armor is extremely helpful.
I was wondering, do you happen to have other good generic recommendations that wouldn’t occur to me? Kobolds are kobolds, humans are humans, but beyond that I’m not familiar enough with the minis to make those determinations.
Thanks!
To find the best price, go to http://www.abPrices.com . It lists almost every store and what price they are selling each mini for. You can also search to find common figures like kobolds.