Forget cheap... go for quality. Tomb Kings Tomb Kings Tomb Kings Warriors of Chaos Warriors of Chaos Warriors of Chaos
Unless of course one wishes to consistently or even semi-consistently win in 8th Edition, hahaha! My favourite army consistently alternates between Tomb Kings, Lizardmen and Warriors of Chaos. At the moment, it is TK!
To be honest it is fairly well balanced, more so than many past editions. The difference between most books is fairly close, and even the weakest army has a chance to defeat the strongest, but it does take a bit of extra luck or extra skill.
This debate is like to kick a dead forse, but when army A got a small chance to beat army B, if luck favors army A and stars aligned and player A knows perfectly what must be done, then the game can be fun, but i wouldn't consider it balanced . The game was enough balanced by itself (except for magic) but the gap within armies was variabile from "very small" to "pretty wide". Edit: must be said that the fact that some armies codex was not updated, was of no help.
I'm not claiming it was perfectly balanced but what wargame is? I'm just saying that compared to other games it was pretty good. I'm sure T9A is more balanced, but at the expense of flavour and fun. 8th edition was certainly more balanced than 7th was (remember Dark Elves and Daemons?) and from the sounds of it, it is more balanced than AoS (which has factions that are nearly unplayable). Only 3 armies were without an 8th edition book: Bretonnia (6th ed.), Beastmen (7th ed.) and Skaven (7th ed.). Of those only Bretonnia and Beastmen were lagging behind as Skaven were actually one of the stronger armies.
I do like this store; I have recently gotten a few more things from them, though of the samurai variety
Yup. He has decent prices on warlord stuff. And the wargames factory turned warlord samurai are ace figures