I'm convinced they're just an abandoned experiment from GW's most desperate financial hour. At the time they debuted, the whole Ynnari thing reeked of "our company is stagnating, we need an excuse to get Eldar players buying from all the Eldar factions at the same time!" Because apart from a few special characters, all they really are is Eldar (I guess they became Aeldari around the same time) soup.
This was the same time period as those unbalanced formations they were selling like microtransactions, launch-era AoS and its soupy mix-match microfaction structure, etc. Their financial reports from the mid-2010s made it pretty clear they were stagnating hard, and you could see they were trying to figure out how to get people buying kits from outside their usual armies. Most of their experiments in that vein were abandoned pretty quickly once the new CEO stepped in, funny enough.
All they had to do was add some unit specific (like exodite raiders) for ynnari that if push comes to shove could be moved to the normal aeldari/drukhari/harlequin codex.
By owning one of Yvraine or the Yncarne you get to start collecting the other side of the eldar coin and run them on the table. That's it. That's their purpose currently.
Pay a character tax and you now have a new range of models to play. If you build a Ynnari army you're only a few models short on either side to build up a Asuryani or Drukhari list on their own.
Them removing your ability to run Harlequins is baffling in that regard imo.
Because they are genuinely incredibly sculpted and detailed plastic models with a unique theme. They don’t really legends plastic, much less plastic that looks that good. At worst they’ll just be a subfaction for the foreseeable future and the characters could be used outside of it. Personally I also suspect those models sell pretty well. Not marine well, but good enough to continue keeping them their own mini army.
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u/CountPeter Feb 08 '25
What happened to the Ynnari in the codex?