One of the things that’s placed a bit of a hindrance on my painting motivation and time recently is the pressure of what’s become “gig economy” work and the instability that comes along with that. While I have my paint tray started and have some neat stuff on the way, it’s also been difficult to motivate myself because my living situation could change by the end of the year, and because I didn’t have a plan for transporting my miniatures in the event that I had to move (locally or abroad alike). I’m very happy with the two armies that I’ve built up but I dreaded adding anything new to them without having a plan to transport what I had, let alone anything else I might add in the meantime.

So, like any sane person would do when money is tight and things are already unstable, I took a $200+ gamble on a storage solution. After checking the Citadel case options and a few third-party solutions as well, I decided to go with KR Cases, and picked up their Kaiser 2 transport bag, filled with their Death Guard Set C and Eldar Set D assortment of foam trays, and a special tray just for my Howling Banshee models. My plan was to mix-and-match some of the trays up, since my Death Guard have a lower model-count anyways. (And, lastly, I ordered an accessory case to get that sweet, sweet free shipping.) As the Fedex truck dropped the box off at the door and drove off, I didn’t waste any time breaking it open and seeing if the gamble had paid off. I have to say that I’m thrilled with the results.

The package included a checklist of all of the items I’d ordered, manually ticked off in pen, which was a good note to start on. I took the two cardboard cases, the accessory case, the extra foam tray, and the bag all out of the box and set to work. The first thing I wanted to make sure of, of course, was that my miniatures would fit and that this would work as a transport solution. And for the most part, it did brilliantly – though I do have to add a couple small disclaimers to that. The tray that’s advertised for the Falcon / Fire Prism likely wouldn’t have accommodated the barrel of the Prism Cannon if I hadn’t shortened it when building it to accommodate LEDS, and it wasn’t equipped to accommodate the Vectored Engines on the sides of the vehicle. This is a quick fix with an exacto-knife however, so this definitely wasn’t a dealbreaker. I also suspect that to get a Fire Prism to fit properly you’d have to keep the top “shell” of the cannon loose, or magnetized like mine is.

As for my other miniatures, the Howling Banshee tray was fantastic – not just for Banshees, but for a number of my other models that just have weird shapes. The Wraithlord tray works brilliantly, which was a pleasant surprise – I was dreading putting “Ishi’s Grace” into her compartment because of the dynamic pose I’d given, and thought it was going to be too much for the compartment to handle. The extra two spaces that I’m not using for Wraithlords specifically are also enough to accommodate some of my more unwieldly characters – like Jain Zar, Eldrad Ulthran, and others, even if this means that some of them have to share space together. For the most part, getting all of my active Eldar army into the case was an easy, straightforward process where the Fire Prism was the only slight hiccup.

Where things got dicey – and I expected them to get a little dicey – was with the Death Guard. I had concerns that I was probably going to have to modify some of the trays to work for some of the more dynamic-looking miniatures, and for some of the larger characters. Some characters, like Lord Felthius and like my Abraxazz Hierophant, just wouldn’t fit into the tray at all, regardless how I tried to reposition them. Some, like the Malignant Plaguecaster and Lord of Contagion, fit but only barely in the larger parts of the “Terminator” tray. I don’t really see this as a “KR” issue however – it’s hard to make a one-size-fits-all container for GW’s Death Guard terminator and character-scale models given the amount of sizecreep we’ve seen in 8th and 9th edition, and…to be frank, Abraxazz isn’t even a GW model, so that one’s a big mea culpa.

Where things also got a little snug was the container that was advertised for Poxwalkers / Plague Marines, which…now, post-8th edition, are two very different sizes indeed. A lot of the Easy-to-Build Plague Marines still fit into the compartments, but there were some that ended up having to take up space in the Terminator tray because of how far weapons or banners stuck out – I expected that this would be the case, though, and I was just glad in the end that I could get just about all of the models in my “Core” army to fit. I didn’t find room in the end for Felthius or Abraxazz, but those are mostly “fluff” or “show” pieces and I don’t need to have those if I’m just playing a casual last-minute game, and I don’t mind figuring out something for storage/transport later on one or two fancy models.

What did work brilliantly, however, was the tray for the Myphitic Blight-haulers and Foetid Bloat-drones. The Bloat-drone was a little snug but these models went into the trays pretty much perfectly otherwise, with minimal coaxing. And the spare spaces I had in the Plague Marine tray meant that I could dig out some of my less-used Eldar models and poke them into some of the spare spaces as well. When all of the trays were filled up they fit neatly into the cardboard boxes, and the cardboard boxes themselves fit very smoothly into the Kaiser 2 case. The accessory case, which originally I only bought for free shipping and giggles, turned out itself to be a great way to store and carry magnetized heavy weapons for my Eldar, and fits into one of the side pouches. The Kaiser 2 also let me store all of my dice, wound markers, and my range ruler, so…now the only thing I have to carry separately if I play games locally are my Codexes (if needed) and my Datacards.

All things considered, I’m thrilled with how my Kaiser 2 bag and the trays worked out, and I feel a lot more at ease about potentially moving knowing that the models I’m most attached to will probably survive the process. The KR cases are a good balance of cost and functionality, and while they’re not a perfect solution in all cases (see Fire Prism and Lord Felthius) I think it was the right one for me, and worth the slight price-bump from a $150 Citadel Crusade case to a $225 KR bundle. It’ll also be a hell of a lot more convenient if I end up having to (god forbid) ever carry this on an airplane.

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