Also, they're one of the armies in the current starter box. It'd be ridiculous to kill an army off while you're still presenting it in the starter kit. "Hey, I want to build an army with more of these ratmen. How do I do that?" "Sorry, son, you can't, they don't exist any more." Yeah, that'd go well.
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Really? That's horrible. Especially after seeing what they do with the old books (tear off the cover at the very least to make them unusable, and then chuck them in the trash with the piles of unsold $4 White Dwarf and $12 Visions magazines). They must have a stupendous deal on printing to be able to just throw out all these publications without even trying to recycle them (or, in the case of the magazines, sell them as back issues). Which just leads me again to wondering why the books and magazines cost so much...