Games Workshop has a phrase it likes to use when a unit gets cut. The Legends FAQ describes it as taking “a well-deserved break from active duty,” like the unit filed the paperwork itself. I read that line for the first time years ago and it’s stuck with me ever since, mostly because it’s such a specific kind of corporate gentleness. It reads like the sort of phrasing HR uses for a retiring colleague, dropped into a rules document for a plastic soldier.
This week it’s the Burna Boyz’ turn. Codex: Orks went up for pre-order alongside the new Boyz, Warboss, Nazdreg and the rest of the wave, and if you actually sit down and read the unit list instead of just admiring the new sculpts, two things jump out. Burna Boyz aren’t on the contents page. Neither are Lootas. The buggies that used to have four separate datasheets, the Boomdakka Snazzwagon, the Boosta-Blasta, the Megatrakk Scrapjet, the Shokkjump Dragsta, have all been folded into one generic “Warbuggies” entry, though the Rukkatrukk Squigbuggy weirdly kept its own listing. Nobody at GW has said why in so many words. The internet has, obviously, because the internet always does.
What “going Legends” actually means
For anyone who hasn’t had to learn this the hard way: Legends is the status GW gives a unit when its datasheet gets pulled from the current codex. The model still exists, you can still buy it if it’s in production, and there’s a free PDF with points and rules so you can use it in casual games. What you can’t do is take it to a tournament, and you won’t get a balance update for it ever again, because the studio has explicitly said Legends units are frozen. Whatever they cost the day they went in is what they’ll cost until GW decides otherwise, which in practice means forever. It’s been running in something like its current form since 2019, so by the time this codex lands it’ll have quietly outlasted two entire editions of the game.
Orks aren’t even close to the first to get this treatment, and they won’t be the last. Karandras and Prince Yriel went the same way for Aeldari a while back, a pair of named heroes with decades of fiction behind them reduced to a PDF nobody reads unless they already owned the model. Space Wolves lost Canis Wolfborn the same way, and every faction has at least one Forge World kit sitting in that limbo right now, technically playable, technically abandoned. Once you notice the pattern you start seeing it everywhere. Karandras has been kicking around Aeldari codices since before I was born. Now he’s a line in a PDF most players have never opened.
Burna Boyz specifically have a dumb, unglamorous reason for going. The old kit made five models but only sold as a box where one of them had to become the Spanner leader upgrade, so you couldn’t actually build the full squad you wanted out of a single box. It’s a packaging problem dressed up as a rules decision, an awkward sprue from a much older era of Ork tooling finally catching up with a studio that’s redone basically everything else in the range this year. Their flamer profile gets rolled into the standard Ork Boyz datasheet as a weapon option instead, so the actual gun survives even if the unit name doesn’t. Lootas didn’t get that mercy. They’re just gone from the book, weapon options and all, at least until someone at GW decides Dakka Dakka Dakka deserves its own kit again.
I lost a game to five of them once. Rubric Marines, which are supposed to shrug off a chunk of incoming wounds through that flat ignore-hits rule, walked into rapid-fire deffgun range and just evaporated before they got a single shot back. My opponent didn’t even seem that invested in it, he was more excited about a Warboss doing something stupid on the other flank, but I remember standing there doing the maths twice because it didn’t feel like it should have worked that cleanly. That’s the version of Lootas going away for me, the memory of getting deleted by a squad of angry green men with scrap-metal guns because somebody decided more dakka was worth more than accuracy. I never actually owned the models myself.
Orks don’t actually keep records
Applying a memory-based system to this specific army is a strange choice, though. Orks don’t have continuity the way basically every other faction in the game does. There’s no Chapter roll of honour, no dynasty archive, no gene-seed lineage worth preserving. An Ork’s entire biology is built to make individual identity disposable, the fungal spores that grow into new Boyz don’t care which specific Loota died holding the line, they’ll grow more, bigger even, because the fighting itself is what makes the next generation tougher. You could wipe every Ork off a planet and the war would start again from spores in the dirt a century later with nobody any the wiser that it had ever stopped. Legends is a system built entirely around the premise that something worth remembering happened and deserves to be preserved for later. That’s a very human, very Imperial idea to bolt onto the one army whose actual in-universe philosophy is closer to “there wasn’t a last time, there’s only the next fight.”
Actually, hold on. I’m not sure that holds up as cleanly as I want it to. GW isn’t retiring Burna Boyz because of some thematic statement about Ork memory, they’re doing it because a twenty-year-old sprue doesn’t build a legal squad and a modern box needs to sell better than that. The lore reading is mine, not theirs, and probably says more about how I like to think about this hobby than about anything Games Workshop actually intended. Still doesn’t make it wrong exactly. Just makes it mine.
The buggies are a slightly different case, and honestly a weirder one to me. Four separate vehicles built by different Meks with different obsessions, one for pure speed, one for a chunk of dakka nailed to a chassis, one that’s basically a bomb on wheels, all mashed into a single “Warbuggies” datasheet where you presumably just pick a wargear option and move on. Ork tech has never worked because a Mek understood engineering, it works because enough Orks believe it should, and part of what made those four kits fun on the tabletop was that each one felt like a different Mek’s personal madness given wheels. Consolidating them into one generic entry is efficient. It’s also the kind of thing that quietly erases the personality out of a range one merger at a time, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence so much as it’s just what happens when fifteen detachments need to fit in one book and something has to give.
There’s a version of this conversation that’s just about the Baneblade, honestly. GW discontinued the actual physical Baneblade kit outright rather than Legends-ing it, which is a harder kind of gone, no PDF is going to bring back a model nobody’s manufacturing anymore. Legends at least leaves the door open a crack. You can still buy a Burna Boy on the secondary market, you can still play him in a narrative game if your group’s up for it, he’s just benched. Whether that distinction matters to you probably depends on how attached you were to the specific plastic in the first place, and I’ll be honest, I wasn’t attached to any of this. I don’t play Orks. I’ve never owned a Loota. I looked up what a Shokkjump Dragsta actually did about twenty minutes before writing this paragraph.
Kiran’s going to see this and tell me I’ve got no business having opinions about an army I’ve never fielded, and he’s not wrong, but he mains Death Guard and still argues with me about whether Ahriman would beat Typhus in a straight fight, so I don’t think either of us has the moral high ground on staying in our lane. Last month someone at my local store dropped the best part of forty quid on a full five-Loota squad for an escalation league army, with no idea the unit was about to vanish off the book. Watching him find out over the group chat this week was its own small, quiet tragedy. Dead has always come in more than one flavour in this game, and going Legends is somewhere near the gentle end of that scale.
Burna Boyz and Lootas are off the codex contents page as of this week. There’s a free PDF somewhere with their old stats on it, points frozen exactly where they were left the day they went in, still legal at my local store if the TO can’t be bothered to enforce the ban. In a year or two somebody’s kid is going to find a bag of them at a car boot sale and have absolutely no idea any of this happened.
