There are purchases, and then there are events.
This was the latter.
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| "The BIG Giant!" |
What began in late November 2025 as a straightforward (if ambitious) acquisition of a 1983 Citadel Giant turned into a multi-week exercise in probability theory, logistics archaeology, and patience-testing uncertainty, capped off by an ending so absurd that it deserves to be documented properly.
This post is that documentation. A follow-up post will contain the mind bending series of improbabilities that led to me finding the giant, but that is for a last day.
Now, because the story needs embellishment, it really doesn’t, but because it illustrates something collectors understand instinctively and outsiders rarely see: the journey matters almost as much as the object.
The Find
The giant itself needs little introduction to Oldhammer collectors. Early Citadel giants are iconic, heavy, and un-apologetically of their era: full of character, strange proportions, and sculptural craziness.
What made this one unusual wasn’t just condition or completeness, but the seller’s claim of provenance:
• Cast directly from original Citadel molds
• Not a retail release
• Produced long after normal production had ended
• Originating from a former Games Workshop staff member
That combination alone put this piece firmly outside the normal collecting pipeline.
I made an offer.
It was accepted.
And then… shipping in late November/early December “happened.”
The Waiting Begins
Once the package actually entered the shipping system, things accelerated — and then immediately became opaque.
There were two shipments tied to the giant:
• Shipment 1: The giant itself
• Shipment 2: A secondary shipment containing rare hands and two heads including
the feral bearded head; the most difficult of the five to acquire.
Tracking information oscillated between “in customs,” “shipping,” and “somewhere that definitely exists, trust us.”
At various points, both packages appeared to be:
• in New York,
• not in New York,
• cleared customs,
• not cleared customs,
• and possibly sitting on a pallet that both existed and did not exist simultaneously.
Schrödinger’s pallet, if you will.
The Absurd Resolution
Then, on a quiet Saturday morning, reality intervened.
At 9:19 AM, right within my normal USPS delivery window, the giant arrived.
No warning.
No accurate tracking update.
Just… there.
A fleeting phone notification earlier that morning hinted at something “giant”-related, then vanished. The databases hadn’t caught up, but the truck had.
Later that same day — while we were out shopping — Shipment 2 arrived as well.
Both shipments.
Same day.
After weeks of uncertainty.
The system didn’t announce victory.
It simply delivered the boxes and pretended nothing unusual had happened.
Perspective
The giant is really cool. The heads and hands are fantastic. The odds involved were absurd enough to be memorable. But in the end, this was a good problem to have, and one that resolved without loss.
Before paint removal but having safely arrived.
Actually when I say the odds were absurd? That’s an understatement. Part 2 of this story will contain the roughly 18 steps of improbability that I successfully navigated to come out the other side with a complete giant…in six days. This shouldn’t have happened even once, but it did.
Epilogue: The Name
The giant has been named:
Duncan the Drunken.
He currently resides downstairs in the man cave, awaiting his turn on the painting table. There will be tartan. There will be red hair. There will be decisions made slowly and deliberately.
For now, though, the saga is complete.
If there’s a lesson here, it’s a simple one: Tracking is advisory. Reality does what it wants. And sometimes… it’s just Saturday and an ultra rare citadel miniature shows up at your front door.
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