What is Mantic Direct?

On the website or even at your friendly local game store you may have heard the term ‘Mantic Direct’ and wondered ‘what the heck does that mean’. Well, in today’s blog we’re going to lift the lid on Mantic Direct and explain exactly what it is and why you should be excited about it.

Put rather simply, Mantic Direct is products that don’t have a full retail release, or did have a retail release but were part of a much bigger product. Typically Mantic Direct releases won’t have retail packaging, i.e. a box with a lovely picture on, and will probably only be available through your FLGS if you ask them to order it in.

But what sort of things you can buy from Mantic Direct? Well, let’s have a look shall we?

UPGRADE PARTS

Often – particularly when it comes to Kings of War – you’ll find that unit listings have different weapon options, like two-handed weapons or the opportunity to give them ranged upgrades. Although we try to make lots of weapons on the hard plastic sprues, sometimes we simply run out of room. As a result we tend to make these upgrades in resin or metal. These can be sold as regiment packs, like the Ice Naiads, but the beauty of Mantic Direct is that we can sell the upgrade parts on their own. This means you can upgrade any existing miniatures you might already have, without having to buy loads more models.

For example, this month we’re launching lots of different Salamander upgrade parts. The Unblooded, Ceremonial Guard and Corsairs all use the hard plastic Salamander sprue as the main body, but the upgrade parts are used to build totally different units. This means you can buy a regiment of the hard plastics but then customise them to be Corsairs or Primes, for example. Mantic Direct gives us more flexibility rather than just having to release units as regiments or troops.

INDIVIDUAL HEROES

Sometimes we include very cool heroes, like Twitch Keenear in new two-player sets. Or, in a similar fashion, we bundle together a bunch of cool models in one of our Vanguard boosters. Although both of these are a great way to get a whole bunch of awesome minis, when you’re putting together your army, you might want multiples of one particular model – rather than having to buy the whole set again.

The Ogre Berserker Bully is a great example of this. Although the Bully is included in the Vanguard Booster, Kings of War players often want two or three in their army and buying three Vanguard bundles could become rather expensive. Instead, we made the Bully available on its own as part of Mantic Direct.

Likewise, we’ve got the Matsudan for the Asterians in Deadzone. These are a really characterful unit and players may want to run an entire Strike Team of just Matsudan but want to pick and choose between the Yokozuna or Inashi, rather than having to buy the Matsudan booster again. So, it’s Mantic Direct to the rescue because all of them are available individually, so you can carefully craft your squad.

In 2022 we’ll be expanding the range of Mantic Direct heroes and individual miniatures with our exciting ‘metal to resin’ program. This will see some of our most popular metal miniatures moved into resin so a) we can produce them much easier and b) bring out some of the amazing details that over time have got lost in the metal moulds. Stay tuned for more details on what will be making the move to resin soon.

If you’d like to check out what’s available from Mantic Direct, we’ve got a special category on the website where you can browse to your heart’s content. Check it out here.