To summarize: This petition is to call for Games Workshop to find an alternative to sending the Cursed City characters and units to Warhammer Legends, and allow them to continue to be played in Age of Sigmar Matched Play - if not as part of the wider Soublight roster, then potentially in their own Regiment or Army of Renown.

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Soulblight Gravelords players the world over rejoiced when Cursed City was released in 2021. With it came a new, exciting and uniquely "Age of Sigmar" take on the undead kingdoms of the Mortal Realms. The characters and servants of the Vyrkos Dynasty were represented with beautiful (for a zombie) and dynamic models which expanded the range of choices for Soulblight players in Age of Sigmar - letting them empty the corpse-gardens of Gorslav the Gravekeeper, or chase down fleeing prey with Vyrkos Bloodborn.

Now, as 4th Edition continues to relegate models from specialist and side-games to Legends status and thereby render them illegal for tournament play, it seems that the models of Cursed City will be the next to suffer the same fate.

This is a shame, and stings all the more because the choice seems to be one of expedience as opposed to game design needs. Radukar the Wolf is purported to be the only model surviving the shift to Legends, based simply on the fact that he could continue to be sold as an individual model without his sprue being re-tooled.

It would be one thing if these models were being retired due to their age. But that's not the case - these models are some of the most exciting in the entire Soulblight range, and there are a dozen other units with older models (including ones that date back to Warhammer Fantasy).

It would be another if there were new models being released to fill the void left by these models, many of whom fulfill fun and unique roles on the battlefield, but they are not. Gorslav's role in supporting Deadwalkers, the speed and aggression of the Vargskyr and Vyrkos Bloodborne, the variations on existing characters provided by Halgrim and Torgillius: all of these give Vyrkos players a wonderful way to theme their lists, and all Soulblight players much-needed variety in unit options.

Lastly, many of the Cursed City models are on base sizes or have model silhouettes that make proxying them as other Soulblight units a non-starter. Bloodborn are not effective stand-ins for Trueblades (either by silhouette or number), Torgillius and Gorslav are on dramatically larger bases than other analogous characters, and Soulblight don't even have another unit on 40mm bases, putting Kosargi Nightguard in an especially sad spot.

So, what do we do?

We make it clear to Games Workshop that enticing people into a game with exciting new models only to have those same models less than five years later is the sort of cynical treatment that we as hobbyists and lovers of the Age of Sigmar setting find upsetting and disappointing. As a best-case scenario, Games Workshop should consider continuing to sell the unique Soulblight models from Cursed City in their own boxed set. The Bloodborn, Kosargi, Vargskyr, and named characters all share Sprue C of the Cursed City boxed set, and could very reasonably be repackaged as their own box of "Vyrkos Retainers."

At worst, these units should continue to receive rules support. While it is unreasonable to expect that Games Workshop would change a book that's already on pre-order, releasing a digital rules update with Matched Play profiles for the Cursed City characters would go a great way towards building goodwill with the Age of Sigmar community. It would make us that much more likely to buy specialist products and games set in the expanded AoS universe. Even if the rules team decided that adding Cursed City models back to the main Soulblight line could create issues of internal balance, they could be given rules as an Army of Renown or Regiment of Renown to allow them continued life in matched play.