Dark Eldar: Archon Conversion - the past meets the present

I don't want blood. I can take your blood. I am asking for souls. Only you can give me your soul.

My nostalgia for the original range of Dark Eldar models has lead me to purchase a fair few old metal models on ebay, including some of the unreleased concept models sculpted by Gary Morley and Chris Fitzpatrick. Some early readers of this blog may remember that in my first Dark Eldar post (about my Kruellagh the Vile conversion), I hinted that I was planning to convert another archon using a model  even older than Kruellagh. Well, the time to show that conversion has finally arrived (despite taking much longer than I had originally planned, ha ha)!

Imperator Rex: the Imperial Knight Reveal!

Victory does not always rest with the big guns; but if we rest in front of them we shall be lost.

Apocalypse passed by without me giving it so much as a second thought, despite Games Workshop’s hope it would crash into my life with the full fury of a Lucius Pattern Warhound titan kicking aside some wave serpents.  While the two models they released for Apocalypse (Lord of Skulls, and the Tesseract Vault) look excellent, the $160 price tag was hard to swallow.  And when I only get to play a game of 40k every few months, I would rather play a standard game and try to fine tune a list, as opposed to playing something filled with crazy world-ending monstrosities that are imbalanced and liable to make the game one-sided. Games Workshop was obviously unsatisfied with the sales of Apocalypse, because they quickly followed it up with Escalation, allowing the imbalanced Lords of War to be taken in regular games of 40,000.  Even with this release, I was still unmoved.  Honestly, Dreamforge Games got closer to convincing me to try out these rulesets when they released their Leviathan Crusader, than Games Workshop did with any of their efforts.  And while I bought and assembled a Leviathan Crusader, I never tried out either of the rulesets, as one titan does not make for a good game of Escalation or Apocalypse.  It looks like this is about to change, however, as last week images leaked revealing that Games Workshop is finally bringing titans out of Epic 40,000 and into Warhammer 40,000.

The Evolution of the Tyranid Warrior

In space, no one can hear you scream.

The recent tyranid release was met with a lot of skepticism and pessimism, with many claiming that its power level was not high enough for it to contend with most competitive lists (aka Tau and Eldar). And while the point costs of units went down almost across the board, very few major adjustments were made. One unit which many people were anxiously awaiting an update was the tyranid warriors. They saw a lot of use in 3rd edition when they were immune to instant death, but when they lost this in 4th, it was difficult to justify their point cost considering that a single krak rocket could kill one of the 3 wound horrors. Now that the dust has settled from the new tyranid release, it is clear that the warriors are still in the same predicament they have been in for years. You pay a premium to get a synapse spreading 3 wound body, but due to a low toughness and save they just are not durable.

Ferrus Manus: Unboxing

Ferrus comes with the most pieces yet of the Primarchs!

Frequenters of this blog might already know how impressed we were Simon Egan’s third primarch model, Ferrus Manus of the Iron Hands, selecting him as our favorite model of 2013.  Although I spoke at length about various aspects of the model when he was initially unveiled, I never actually did an unboxing to show off the components of the kit like I did with Fulgrim.  Although I have had the kit for a little over a month now, I had a few issues with some of the components not being cast well.  Having just received replacement parts in the mail, I decided now is a good time to show everyone the kit and to talk a little bit about Forge World’s excellent customer service.