A bundle of 1,400 sealed OOP Warhammer kits is currently selling on eBay for around $63,000 (£50,000). The collection belongs to Jamie Hutber, who estimates from current eBay sold prices that the brand-new-in-box Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40k kits are worth closer to $100,000 (£80,000).
The contents are diverse, including Space Marine devastators from Rogue Trader, sealed starter sets for Ork-on-Ork car battler GorkaMorka, Necromunda, Mordheim, Battle Masters, Talisman third edition, Space Crusade, the Lord of the Rings spin-off Battle of Five Armies, and army sets for Warhammer 40k factions and Warhammer armies from sundry different editions.
The photographs in this article come from the eBay listing, which provides extensive detail and more photographs of what’s in the bundle.
This is Hutber’s personal collection, but this isn’t the first time that parts of it have been available for sale. Hutber explains in the YouTube video below that he started trading his kits away via the webstore oopminiatures.com simply because he didn’t have the room to fit them in his house any longer.
Hutber describes his collection as “an addiction” in the YouTube video. He started collecting in earnest in 2011, after he was made redundant from a job with the Telegraph and got a redundancy pay-out of six months’ salary. He says “Warhammer wasn’t the biggest problem, but it certainly contributed” to getting into substantial debt, along with gambling problems.
“With any addiction, you don’t follow the progression. It’s a gradual thing, and then one day you go ‘fuck, I’ve wrecked my life’… when you’re in them, you don’t see them for what they are”, Hutber says. He feels “deep regret and deep passion and love” for the models; “I think I’m chasing that dream of childhood”.
Hobbyists joke about our “piles of shame”, but it is important to recognise when spending habits have become unhealthy. I wrote an article for sister site PCGamesN about my own struggles with addictive tendencies, mostly in playing games but also when buying them, and the role ADHD played in that.
Spending addiction can be harmful but it can be managed with appropriate help from mental health specialists.
If this article’s left you feeling a little bleak about the hobby, we have two heart warming stories to cheer you up: a first-person account of a brand-new hobbyist getting into painting Warhammer despite a tremor, and a young man whose Make A Wish foundation wish to create an original Necron dynasty came true.