Interesting you should mention casts. There's a seller in the UK I buy from all the time, but I'm starting to wonder if he's doing the same thing. The reason why is that he always seems to have the same minis available, plus or minus a few other items. They're nice minis, though.

How can you tell if they're casts? I like buying used, but feel kind of icky buying "Niky Shoes" as it were.

_________________
"Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' until you can find a rock." -Will Rogers

The best way to know what something is going for on Ebay is to watch a model you like for a few auctions. You can add it to your watch list, or my personal favorite, bid an obscenely low amount. Then you get notifications on when you're outbid and when the auction is ending. That way you can judge if you want to fork out the cash for that particular auction.

Buy it Now listings like the one above almost always are more money than bidding, but you know what you are paying and are guaranteed to win the auction. Take it from me, there's nothing that will burn your biscuit quite like someone sniping a bid in the last 20 seconds of an auction, especially when your crummy rural internet is just chugging along.

_________________
"Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' until you can find a rock." -Will Rogers

If you go to Advanced options next to the search bar (Erweiterte Suche), you can look for items that were previously online, and the prices they did or did not sell for. A good way to find how regularly items appear and what price you would have to be prepared to pay. Wouldn't personally pay the prices in the advertised auction, but in the end the value just depends on what people are willing to pay. Do keep in mind that even some items listed as rare and out of production may not at all be so - the auction listed has a painted Floi for 20 pounds, while it's still readily available from Games Workshop for 7.70...

Decent size job lot going cheap here - just noticed a fair few metal Haldir's elves - including a captain - hidden inside! Fair few other interesting bits alongside the regulars - Knights of Rivendell, Aragorn King, Gimli and Legolas on horse, etc.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Lord-of-the- ... 3150610667

_________________
Inspiration: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/p4gaq4nesnbf ... i1f8a?dl=0

I've not currently come across any recasts although I am sure they exist...how many for sbg is up in the air.

While there may be a few pages online discussing the topic, it's not always so black n white either due to some other factors.

Clearly a lack of detail or very dodgy detail would be a dead give away for official ones. However due to GW's lack of quality control the last 15 years with metal, quite a bit also slips by but this generally has to do with miscasts vs lack of detail.

I've had quite a few official miscasts and broken pieces upon opening boxes and sometimes the odd blister too.

Some of the most common "official" miscasts from GW seem to be cracked areas of metal, pure blobs of metal that have not cast at all...areas like sword hilts or hands etc. I can think of a number of situations over warhammer fantasy, warhammer 40k, and SBG through the years where I've encountered these around 15-20% of the time.

None of these are recasts but if buying them on ebay some of these could pop the idea into peoples minds. Due to the nature of many of the SBG sculpts themselves ( some choices I would have bit the bullet and preferred thicker parts vs realistic ) come almost broken right out of the mold.

The Khazad Guard axe shafts come to mind, and one of the worst culprits to date ( I had GW direct send me 3 replacements all suffer from the same issue and you will see many online too with conversions/broken spot ) is The Armoured Glorfindel on foot, the joint where the sword meets his hand is consistently hanging there in the blister, as soon as you bend it even gently it crumbles right off since the metal is cracked there...one would think this would have some air channels cut with how bad the problem is.

There is quite a few other situations like this over the SBG range, I've had some specters with dodgy swords, I've had arnor warriors sword sheaths end in blobs where there should be banding, and I've had a ringwraiths sword cast more like a dagger due to the metal not pouring fully to the length.

Some might call these complains "AR" but with GW prices I like to have a 99% solid cast you know ?

Now as far as recasts, they exist in metal, some of them can actually be "decent" quality. Some give aways with these are multi mold lines...bits of weird metal blobs on random spots, and an overall lack of sharp strong detail. Having an original to compare to ( undercoated helps to tell ) can often help determine this too, although many official citadel metal minis over the years have also had double mold lines.

One area that is a sure dead give away is the metal itself, if its anything but the tin pewter mix post mid 90s then it's almost always going to be a recast if its lead, and you can easily tell the difference between lead and pewter casts when working with them. The lead is generally much "softer" and bents super easy.

At this point I think a lot of the recasts are the classic rogue trader and early fantasy era stuff. Some of it was sold through mail order even in the 2000s so pewter also, but when you start finding large lots of like 20-50 single pose castings of 80s fantasy battle and other stuff...it starts to raise some questions.

Yes there is indeed individuals out there who do happen to have decent little collections from those days, but it's by no means the norm. You might find for example quite a few single listings of x figure or 5-10 of them at once....finding large lots is really suspect.

With SBG there is quite few situations also where a number of the figures are so common that they are hard to give away, you will see a lot of these like 3-5 legoals from fellowship box with broken bits or shoddy paint jobs with peanuts asking prices...this is 100% normal.

Likewise many of the heroes are common as dirt too, the more popular sculpts ( like aragorn from breaking of ) these are not so much rare but in demand and hung onto and the ones out there a tad higher than the common ones.

Many of the war of the ring metal sculpts ( the mass battle game ) can be rarer/expensive due to many of them being out of production, I once sold a marshal of the r Eomer for 130 bucks having paid around 16 for it new back then.