Thanks for the advice, Lugia. I'll try to come up with one crammed Mantis to see how things would look when starting out.
Having individual modules that play one voice of percussion tends to get expensive in terms of real estate (case HP) and cost ($$).
A sample playback module might be something worth having especially in the beginning.
-- Ronin1973
That's a good point and therefore I feel it might be best to start with continuing to use the Model:Cycles to generate most of the percussion. Later on I'm going to have more insight on what modules to buy to get the sounds I want and also what to look for in a sampler module.