Recently, I ended an era here at Privateer Press.

I was shelving some new replacements for old molds in our mold library, and one of them was for the head of the original Iron Lich Asphyxious sculpt. As I pulled it off the shelf, a realization hit me: this mold is as old as I am (in Privateer Press years). Actually, it’s even older.

I started in casting in June of 2003, coming on board just in time to start spinning Wave 3 (back then we numbered each set of releases). I spent a day making some Khador ’jack parts, then it was weeks of Kelly and I making piles and piles of Man-O-War Shocktroopers. Asphyxious was Wave 2, and thus already made before I started.

Molds come and go. Most get retired because of wear and damage. Sometimes they just don’t perform as efficiently as we need, and we try a different method for laying it up. Some long-lived molds get spun so much and have so much metal flow through them they continue to vulcanize, becoming too stiff to properly seal. That’s what happened to some of those Man-O-War molds I was spinning eight years ago.

As I looked at the Asphyxious head mold, I recognized the telltale signs that pointed out just how old it was. All of the original battlebox models have had their molds remade time and again. I had seen molds for everything else from Wave 2 redone. For example, not a single one of the original Man-O-War molds is still in service. This Asphyxious mold, however, had been making tiny little heads for over eight years. It was the oldest mold we had on the shelf, the last from those earliest releases that launched the game. It carried memories of the “old place,” where I started learning my craft and started this journey as a part of Privateer Press. It has served us well and is a reminder of our humble start and just how far we’ve come.

Thank you, CX-0025-B-1.