Miniature Monday 70

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Miniature Monday, turning 70 today which is, well, a number. It was a decently busy week on the hobby table although I got sidetracked (like in rule n°1 of the wasteland, man I loved the Fallout series!)

Anyway, first thing first, the actual goal of the present hobby-time: painting the Stormcast Spearhead contents. Having finished the Annihilators, I have started the only missing piece: the Knight Vexillor with Banner of the Apotheosis. I decided to keep the “new” version of the colour scheme for the Flamescar Stormkeep of Edassa, so I used gunmetal as a base layer for the orange and gold contrast paints. So this is the work in progress situation as of this morning.

Yeah, still quite some way to go, but I enjoyed painting it so far. At this stage the banner (apart from 10000 mistakes du to my always shoddy brush control) has some nice manga vibes.

The new thing I plan to test for this mini is the Mojave Crackle Paint by Greenstuff World. I saw it at my FLGS (where the “L” stands for “Local to my workplace” which happens to be some 200km away from my home) and thought the colour was not too far from the one I have been using for the basing of my Stormcast. We’ll see how that will turn out!

Game-wise, I got to play a game of Old World mid-week thanks to the public holiday. I played my standard 1500 points game vs my clubmate’s bretonniants, in the scenario which randomly puts your units in reserve -whacky, to say the least. It started pretty badly for me, with more than half of my army going into reserve, but then my luck-debt got paid in full when my Wild Riders rolled super hot (or rather, my opponent rolled super badly) and cleared an entire lance of knights of the realm. From there my opponent didn’t have enough unit to threaten my archers and wizards.

In terms of lessons, I enjoyed playing with a lot of magic (two level 4s, using the ability to field both a lvl 4 Spellweaver and a Treeman ancient, plus a unit of Sisters of the Thorn) but I won’t be picking Plague of Rust anymore, as it’s just too powerful in combination with the Wood Elves shooting -of course, too powerful for the context of my games, not in absolute terms. All in all, it was a very fun game with a couple of memorable moments, and even if it turned badly for my opponent, it was over pretty quickly and we could use the rest of the evening to chat about the future of the Old World, with AoS 4 incoming and our ideas for running a campaign at the club.

I mentioned being sidetracked in the introduction, and I also mentioned Fallout. So, last week we finished watching the series with my wife and we both loved it. Also, all the Brotherhood of Steel action made me want to paint some power armour. I considered getting some actual Fallout minis but ultimately I realised I would have no one to play the game at the club and decided instead to get some more “mainstream” power armour and buy my first space marines after 6 years in the hobby. I opted for the Grey Knights because I liked the idea of space witchers and because of the manageable roster -as opposed to other space marines. Plus, you can field a full-infantry combat patrol and I wanted to paint power armour, not tanks. So, here’s the first unit (a Strike Squad) assembled, using weapons and heads from my big Stormcast bitz box to give a more space-fantasy vibe.

As an aside, the Stormcast bitz fit incredibly well, both size-wise and shape wise: other than a bit of cutting and filing, I only needed a bit of green stuff on one of the minis to fit them. I am still thinking about the colour scheme and name. On the latter, the one which I have concoted at the moment is “The Errant Coven of the Black Rose”, also known (by those who don’t like them very much) as “The Witches of Mount Anarch”. For the former, I am thinking, on top of steel armour (because that was the initial idea) black and purple, with a punk-rock vibe.

And that’s all for this week, tune in next Monday to see who wins out the race to the top of my TODO pile!