Christmas Blogs: A Message from Ronnie

Welcome to our Christmas Blogs! Over the next few days, we’re going to be keeping you updated about what’s coming up for all your favourite Mantic products. Here are the dates to mark in your calendar.

• December 26th – review of the year by Ronnie
• December 27th – Vanguard in 2021
• December 28th – what’s coming up from Winged Hussar
• December 29th – Brush with Death 2021
• December 30th – Kings of War in 2021
• December 31st – The Walking Dead in 2021
• January 1st – Armada in 2021
• January 2nd – DreadBall in 2021
• January 3rd – sci-fi in 2021
• January 4th – Hellboy in 2021

As you can see it’s a packed schedule, so make sure you tune in every day for sneak peeks, hot off the press information and more!

RONNIE'S CHRISTMAS MESSAGE

Ronnie here and wow, well hasn’t this year flown by! Can’t believe it’s May already and time for the Mantic Open Day.

EDITOR – Ronnie, it’s December. This is your Christmas blog!

WHAT??!?!?! Well, 2020 really is the year that….well who exactly knows what the hell happened in 2020! In some ways life went on as normal, and in others – well just the most absurd and crazy years, certainly of my life!

It doesn’t seem like five minutes since we were writing the 12 Days of Christmas Blogs telling you all about the new hard plastic goblins and Armada was just a twinkle in my eye!

I’ll be the first to say that 2020 has been a crazy year! What has helped all of us at Mantic get through has been the fantastic support from the community – and I hope you feel we have done the same back. Rob and his web team made a huge effort to give away digital rule sets and pump out lots of great content (often sharing the best from the community) during lockdown to keep people amused and engaged, even where they didn’t have the funds or access to online stores.

Although it’s been a terrible shame that stores have had to close, and we haven’t been able to get together for big events like Clash of Kings, Adepticon, Gencon or Open Days, the way the community has pulled together has been amazing. We’ve seen people create their own online versions of our games (and even play some huge tournaments) and the number of hobby projects popping up on social media has been astounding.

We also had a great response to our own Virtual Open Days. Although we couldn’t invite people to HQ, we brought the event to living rooms around the world… I’m sure you never thought the idea of seeing me in your living room was so exciting!!  :p Just in case you missed it, you can get the best bits <here>. The Virtual Open Day also showed us that our audience is far bigger than just the 100 or so people that can get to Nottingham once or twice a year. We had comments and banter from literally all across the globe – and although we hope we will be back out at shows soon, the V.O.D. was such a success that we’ll definitely be doing it online again in the future - and we’re already planning one for the first weekend in April… so mark your calendars!

Despite the disruption of COVID, we mostly kept the release schedule on track. Although we lost around three months of the year when lockdown kicked in, we tried to catch up as much as possible once lockdown ended. We released awesome new models, like the Spectra for Deadzone, incredible hard plastic goblins AND Ratkin for KoW, plus the Whisperers faction for The Walking Dead, and…

Of course, we had the absolutely massive launch of Armada. This was a mammoth undertaking, which required us to produced almost 200,000(!) pieces of resin. As a result, we had to get a new resin machine working, hire more staff, move to on double shifts and then get almost the entire business involved with packing and shipping – in the middle of the pandemic (and just before Brexit)! But – somehow – we got there and delivered it mostly around the launch window! Thank you for your patience if you were at the end of queue waiting for your order to ship.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all the Mantic staff. During a very difficult year they managed to keep despatch open, create and work in a safe workplace, and continued to ship products around the globe throughout. Then the Armada launch hit, and it was all hands on deck (ha ha!) to get that out the door – all the while they were personally coping with this crazy year.

Finally, I would like to thank all of you - our customers and fans. Thanks to your support we were able to keep trading via the Mantic website and continued to supply third party stores throughout a challenging time. Your hobby projects have been an inspiration to us. We have loved to see the new armies, factions and warbands being built and painted. It’s a shame that there haven’t been enough occasions to get them on the gaming table and into action – but we have to save something to look forward to in 2021!

THANK YOU FROM RONNIE

Anyway, I am sure you have all vastly reduced your ‘lead under the bed’ and ‘plastic mountains’  and got everything painted and game ready –  😉 so no doubt now you are looking for a new project (or 3) to get stuck into…

And as a way of saying thank you – (and because we still probably have 2 or 3 more months before we can properly get back to face to face gaming and tournaments!) I’ve set up a Christmas present voucher giving you all £10…(off!!)

A FESTIVE TREAT FROM RONNIE

Until January 31^st, if you spend £50 or more on the Mantic website, and use the code CHRISTMASRONNIE you’ll get £10 off your order! I hope that’ll help you get started with a new hobby project for 2021. Please note it only applies to Mantic products... although surely that's all you want anyway!

And lastly - Enjoy the Christmas blogs because we’ve got plenty of surprises, leaks and sneak peeks!

Thank you again for your support, I hope you all have a great holiday!

Stay safe, and I look forward to seeing you (for real) in 2021