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Best Miniature Carry Cases & Army Transport - Prices Compared

Pluck or pre-cut, and why the tray decides the bag

Best Miniature Carry Cases & Army Transport - Prices Compared

A carry case is bought once, for an army that is not finished yet, and it either fits the models or it does not. It is also the only accessory on this site where the wrong choice is genuinely hard to live with: a rack that is too small goes on a shelf, but a case whose lid will not close over a converted banner-bearer gets used anyway, and the banner does not survive it. Everything named on this page is priced across the shops we track on our carry case shelf.

Two decisions, in this order: what kind of foam, and then whose system — because the second one is nearly permanent and almost nobody realises that when they buy.

The one decision that matters: pluck foam or pre-cut trays

Pluck foam — sometimes sold as pick-and-pluck or raster foam — arrives as a solid block scored into a grid of small squares. You put the model on top, count the squares it covers, and tear those out with your fingers to make a pocket in exactly that shape. Nothing is measured and nothing is ordered specially.

  • It fits anything, including the conversion nobody makes a tray for, the resin monster with the odd footprint, and the vehicle with a gun barrel pointing sideways.
  • It wastes space, because a torn pocket is always a bit bigger than the model and the walls between pockets have to stay thick enough to hold.
  • It is unkind to spears, banners and antennae. A model lifted out of a snug pluck pocket comes out at an angle, and thin protrusions catch the foam on the way. Pluck the pocket generously around anything fragile even though it costs you a slot.
  • It wears out. Torn pluck foam sheds and softens after a couple of hundred load-outs; on a case you use weekly, expect to replace the tray eventually, which is the strongest argument for a case whose trays are sold separately.

Pre-cut trays are cut in a factory to hold a named thing — thirty infantry on 32mm bases, four bikes, one dreadnought, or the exact contents of a boxed game.

  • They protect better, because the model sits in a pocket the right size instead of a slightly loose one, with no torn edges to snag.
  • They stack and they are legible. You can see at a glance that the tray is a troop tray, so packing is fast and nothing gets forgotten.
  • They tie you to whoever cut them (see the next section), and they only work if your army looks roughly like the army the tray was designed for. A tray cut for thirty infantry holds twenty-eight if two of yours are on 40mm bases.
  • Some are cut for one specific unit, right down to the model — a titan, a particular corvette, a specific boxed game's monsters. Those are superb if you own that thing and useless otherwise.

The practical answer most people arrive at: pluck foam for characters, vehicles and anything converted; pre-cut troop trays for the rank and file. Buy the case, then buy the trays as you work out what you actually carry — which is the way both Battle Foam and Feldherr sell their bodies in the first place, empty and ready for whatever you put in them.

A tray is not a part that fits any bag

This is the trap on this shelf and it is worth a heading of its own. Foam trays are cut to one maker's internal dimensions, and the makers do not share them.

Battle Foam name their footprints on the box: BFS is 11.5 by 7.75 inches, BFM is 15.5 by 8, BFL is 15.5 by 12, MN is 9 by 6 for the small skirmish bags. A tray in one of those sizes fits every Battle Foam body built around that footprint and nothing else. Feldherr work in half-size and full-size trays with their own measurements, and their MINI, MEDIUM and MAXI bodies take one or the other. KR Multicase cut their own again.

So the sequence is: choose the case, and the case chooses which trays you can ever buy. Working the other way round — finding the perfect tray for your army and then hunting for a case that takes it — is how people end up owning two systems.

Three consequences worth knowing before you spend anything:

  1. Thickness is part of the fitment, not a preference. Trays are sold in the same footprint at one, one and a half, two, two and a half, three, three and a half and four inches deep, and you buy the depth to suit the tallest model going in it. Battle Foam's own instruction when you are filling an empty bag is to add a quarter inch to every tray's stated thickness to allow for the tray bottom, then check the total against the bag's stated capacity — which is quoted in inches of foam, not in models.
  2. Capacity is quoted in inches of tray. A bag that "takes eight inches of large trays" means you can stack any combination of large-footprint trays up to eight inches. That is a much more useful number than a model count, because it tells you whether four two-inch troop trays fit or whether you have to choose.
  3. A foam topper is not a spare part. A quarter-inch or half-inch topper laid on a tray works as a lid, a divider, or padding to fill the last of the space in a bag that is not quite full. They are cheap, they are cut to the same footprints, and they are the reason a half-empty case does not rattle.

The ladder: Citadel, Green Stuff World, Feldherr, KR Multicase, Battle Foam

Five names cover almost everything sold in this category, and they are genuinely different products rather than the same case at five prices.

Citadel make the cases you meet in a Games Workshop shop, and they are the simplest thing here. The Crusade Figure Case is the big one — a hard case for a full army — with the Battle Figure Case a step down for a battle-sized force. The two Stormvault cases work differently again: instead of foam they use a bed of silicone bristles that the model's base pushes into, which is very forgiving of odd footprints and needs no plucking at all. The Skirmish size is the Kill Team, warband and Necromunda-gang answer. What you give up across the Citadel range is modularity: the foam or the bristles are the foam, and there is no ladder of trays to buy later.

Green Stuff World take the opposite approach and it is the cheapest route to real capacity. Their Army Transport Bag is a padded shell holding metallised trays on rails — your models sit on magnetised bases and stick to the tray, so there is no foam and no plucking whatsoever. The small size carries a single tray, the medium four levels, and the whole thing is expandable: you buy an extra tray, or extra rails to add more tray heights, or a free-standing extra cabinet that doubles as shelf storage between games. There is a rucksack version if you walk or cycle to a club. The catch is the one you already spotted: it needs magnetised bases, which is a project of its own.

Feldherr are the German maker with the deepest tray catalogue in the hobby, and their system is the most granular. The bodies are a size ladder — MINI, MINI PLUS, MEDIUM, MAXI, plus a rucksack and a Hobby Transporter holdall — and each takes half-size or full-size trays. Two things they do that nobody else does at this scale: magnetic boxes, small hinged tins with a metal floor for a handful of models or a warband, in several depths; and cardboard storage boxes with a carrying handle, sized by tray height, which are the cheapest way in existence to store trays you are not carrying today — four of them ride inside the Transporter.

KR Multicase are the British maker and the ones people mean when they say a case just works. The Kaiser Case 1 is a hard-shell body, the Kaiser Half Transport Bag is a soft bag taking half-height trays, and the original Multicase survives in quarter-size and double-depth bodies. Their tray catalogue is long and detailed and it reaches beyond Warhammer into fleet and squadron games, where the pockets are cut for named ships.

Battle Foam are the American maker and by a wide margin the biggest range here — hundreds of separately purchasable parts. The P.A.C.K. bags are the spine: the 432 Molle is the classic army bag and is sized to pass as carry-on luggage, the 720 and the 1520XL go up from there, and the C4, Mini 3.0 and SB shoulder bag come down to skirmish size. Above the bags sit hard Black Label cases; below them sit stacker and Eco boxes for trays that live at home. Every one is sold empty as well as loaded, and the whole point of the range is that you keep adding to it.

Two more worth naming because they solve a specific problem. Airas make magnetic transport boxes with metal floors and adjustable metal shelves — the magnetised-base route in a rigid box rather than a soft bag. And Monument's GoBag MINI is a soft pluck-foam case for a warband that clips onto their larger hobby bags, which is the neatest answer we have seen to carrying models and a painting kit in one trip.

What size case does an army actually need

Model counts on listings are optimistic, because they assume infantry on small bases and nothing tall. Work from what you carry instead.

A skirmish force — Kill Team, Warcry, Necromunda, a Shatterpoint squad, an RPG party. Ten to twenty models, one or two of them larger. A single half-size or small-footprint case does this comfortably: the Citadel Stormvault Skirmish, a Feldherr MINI, Battle Foam's C4 or Mini 3.0, or a Feldherr magnetic box if the gang is small enough. This is also the one tier where a specific pre-cut tray is often perfect, because a boxed game has a fixed model list — Feldherr cut inserts for the Necromunda: Underhive gangs and for Blood Bowl teams that hold exactly the right number of the right shapes.

A starter army or a Combat Patrol. Twenty-five to forty models, usually a character, a vehicle or a monster among them. This is where people under-buy. You want two to three trays' worth of depth — one deep tray for the big model and one or two shallower ones for infantry — and a body that can take a third tray later. A Feldherr MEDIUM, a KR Kaiser, the Citadel Battle Figure Case or a Green Stuff World small transport bag all land here.

A full army — a 2,000-point list, a tournament force. Sixty to a hundred and twenty models with several large ones. This is a full-size bag with a stack of trays: Battle Foam's 432, a Feldherr MAXI or MAXI PLUS, the Citadel Crusade case, or Green Stuff World's four-level medium bag. If you fly to events, check the bag's outside dimensions against your airline's cabin allowance before anything else — the Battle Foam 432 states carry-on compatibility for exactly this reason, and a case that has to be checked in is a case you are trusting to baggage handlers.

More than one army. Do not buy a bigger bag; buy storage. A stacker or Eco box, or Feldherr's cardboard storage boxes and the Transporter that carries four of them, hold trays at home for a fraction of what another bag costs — and the trays move straight from the box into the bag on game day. This is the single biggest saving available on this shelf and almost nobody makes it first.

Height is what stops a lid closing

No listing leads with this and it is the measurement that decides whether a case works.

Trays are sold by depth, bags by inches of tray. So take your tallest model — the standard-bearer, the wraith with the halberd, the flyer on the flight stand — and measure it from the bottom of the base to the top of whatever sticks up, then add a little. That number, plus a quarter inch for the tray's own bottom, is the minimum tray depth you need for that model, and no amount of care makes a two-inch tray hold a three-inch model.

Three practical points that follow:

  • Fragile protrusions should get a deep pocket, not a snug one. A banner in a tight pluck pocket bends every time the model is lifted.
  • Flight stands come off. Almost every fleet and flyer tray in existence has a separate pocket for the stand, and the models travel unmounted. Take the model off the stand rather than trying to pack it assembled.
  • A part-full case rattles. Fill the last inch with a foam topper or a spare tray rather than leaving air in it — movement inside a case does more damage than the drop that starts it.

What we cannot tell you

Two honest gaps, both worth stating rather than papering over.

Most of this shelf is one shop. The great majority of the cases and trays on it are listed by a single UK retailer, so for a lot of individual trays there is a price on the page and no second price to compare it against. Green Stuff World's own transport line prices in three currencies and reaches every market we cover; Monument's GoBag MINI reaches two; almost everything else is a single UK listing today. Where we hold no checked link at all for a product, the page says so instead of sending you to a search results page and hoping.

No maker publishes a fitment table across brands. There is no chart anywhere that says which Feldherr tray fits which KR body, because the answer is "none of them". We are not going to invent one. The only reliable route is the maker's own stated footprint and the bag's stated capacity in inches, which is why both numbers appear on our product pages wherever the shop records them.

Tips

  • Decide the system before the case. The body you buy is the tray catalogue you are stuck with, and trays are the part you keep buying.
  • Measure your tallest model, then add a quarter inch for the tray bottom. Height, not model count, is what fails.
  • Pluck foam for characters and vehicles, pre-cut trays for infantry. Almost everyone lands here in the end.
  • Buy the body empty and add trays as you learn what you carry. Loaded bundles are convenient and are rarely the load-out you end up with.
  • Storage boxes are far cheaper than a second bag. Trays live at home in cardboard or a stacker box and move into the bag on game day.
  • Fill the empty space. A topper or a spare tray stops movement, and movement is what breaks models.
  • If you fly, check the outside dimensions against the cabin allowance first. It rules out most of the large end of the range before you compare anything else.
  • Magnetised bases change the answer entirely. If you are willing to magnetise, a metal-shelf case skips foam, plucking and fitment tables altogether.

Once the army is home again, the paints need somewhere to live too — our paint rack and storage guide covers the pot-shape trap that catches everyone once.

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Figure cases, army transport bags, magnetic boxes and cut foam trays are priced side by side on our carry case shelf.

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