Contrasting Goblins

Everyone in the hobby is bound to atleast have heard about the contrast paints by now, and those who have been inclined to test them have also likely noticed that at the beginning both black and white were not really well available (the situation has improved in regards to the white, but not the black). For some reason GW has had trouble with the supply of these two colours. I don't know if they're simply the ones with by far the highest demand, or if they've had some sort of trouble in manufacturing or what, but the fact remains that the available supply hasn't been able to keep up with the demand. As luck would have it though, I managed to get a bottle of both the new black and the white, so I also bought a few other colours and both of the primers (a grey and a creamy white) with the intention of testing them out and breaking my mtg induced painting slumber.

The results of that test lead me to the conclusion that many others have come to: the contrast paints aren't going to make regular paints obsolete, but they are fairly impressive. The painting itself is much faster than with paints (provided you're able to leave them as is after the fact or at most do some light highlighting of course), altough it's harder to be neat than with the thicker regular paint. The contrasts in general behave a lot more like shade than paint, except with much better coverage. I tested the colours with two Night Goblin archers because I've been previously using several coats (four to five on average) of nuln oil to paint the robes of my Night Goblins and wanted to see how the contrast equivivalent (called "Black Templar" - it's in the name really) fared in comparison. Goblins are also the sort of minis you'd want to churn out quickly, as you need a pile of them for them to have any use (such as it is) at all.

Left one is on white primer and right is on grey.

I also tested the primers, which I suspect will affect different colours differently, with the fairly dark goblins the difference is negligible though. If I had to choose one for these I'd pick the white, but the differences are miniscule. If you didn't know these were painted on different primers I'm not sure you'd be able to tell even holding them, and certainly not from a distance.

The Gobbos themselves though. As you can see they're not going to win any prizes (much like my other minis), but considering those two took me a bit over an hour combined - basing included - I'm pretty happy with the results. Especially considering that that's less time than it takes to wait for the nuln oil to dry between coats let alone painting the rest of the minis.I'm definitely going to use contrasts for my gobbos, the result is perfectly playable and fast enough to actually be able to get fieldable units out in a reasonable time. You'd have to be some sort of super efficient painting god or at the very least a masochist to paint a full goblin army to display standard anyway.

Elven Legacy

So. As is painfully obvious, I haven't written anything for months. That's due to wanting to keep the blog mostly focused on miniatures, but seeing as I haven't really been doing those lately I figured I might as well write about other stuff (to the detriment of my enormous readership, I'm sure) rather than just not write anything at all. So this is about Magic again.

I'm a very cyclical person for some reason. I have several hobbies, but my interest in each of them tends to ebb and flow around, with one hobby at a time occupying most of my time and interest - at the moment that hobby is MTG. I haven't actually painted anything since spring - needless to say, I won't be reaching my 100 miniature goal (the horror!) - and practically my whole hobby budget each month has been spent on cards, last few of these on building a legacy deck (my opinion on the cost has not changed, but I wanted to get in on the format and bit the bullet). I chose Elves, which is a tribal combo deck based around tons of small elves doing things followed by swinging with a big beast. Sounds fun, right?

Gaea's Cradle is one the most iconic cards of the deck.

 The last card (Cavern of Souls) arrived in the mail yesterday, and as luck would have it my FLGS was running Legacy today, so I went there after work. My matches went pretty badly (I won one match and lost three, and faced three red aggro and/or burn decks in a row [delver, goblin and straight burn], which are pretty bad match ups for the squishy squishy elves. The last opponent played dredge. ), but it was still nice. The feeling of playing with some of the most iconic cards in the games history like Gaea's Cradle or OG Duals (I'm running 2 Bayous and 1 Savannah) is pretty great. Now that I have the deck I'll definately be playing a lot more.

My deck currently looks like this:

Lands
4 Gaea's Cradle
3 Windswept Heath
3 Wooded Foothills
2 Bayou
2 Forest
2 Dryad Arbor
1 Savannah
1 Misty Rainforest
1 Verdant Catacombs
1 Cavern of Souls
1 Pendelhaven

Creatures
4 Heritage Druid
4 Nettle Sentinel
4 Wirewood Symbiote
4 Quirion Ranger
4 Elvish Visionary
1 Llanowar Elves
1 Fyndhorn Elves
1 Elvish Mystic
1 Shaman of the Pack
1 Craterhoof Behemoth
1 Reclamation Sage
1 Archon of Valor's Reach
1 Scavenging Ooze
1 Birchlore Rangers

Instants and Sorceries
4 Glimpse of Nature
4 Green Sun's Zenith
3 Natural Order

Sideboard
3 Abrupt Decay
3 Thoughtseize
3 Veil of Summer
2 Carpet of Flowers
2 Surgical Extraction
1 Assassin's Trophy
1 Dwynen, Gilt-Leaf Daen

I'm running 61 card in the main deck, partly because I want the different options and partly because the slavish adherence to 60 cards that many people advocate for annoys me. Especially the sideboard, but also the main deck will get tweaked once I've played more and got a better understanding of the meta at my FLGS.

Pink camouflage is still camouflage

Modern Space Marines are know for their brightly coloured heraldic armour and disdain for cover, stealth, camouflage and other such un-orky cowardly tactics. This, however, was not always the case. In Rogue Trader era Space Marines not only used camouflage, that camouflage was funky. Brown, black and neon-yellow tiger stripes? Camouflage! Pink and blue camo pattern? Camouflage! And so on. Entire armies painted in those colours must've looked awesome (or horrible, good camo is suprisingly challenging to paint - but let's not be defeatist). Somewhere along their transformation from mind wiped criminals to warrior monks recruited from the finest madmen and child soldiers available the Space Marines stopped wearing their camo shorts, altough they didn't lose their love of bright colours.

Ooo - pretty colours!

This brings us to my latest find (have had a bit of a slow start of the year on the mini front because I kinda got bit by the MTG bug again. That's why lately there hasn't been any posts about my own painting - or, indeed, anything.). Bunch of camouflaged Rhinos! I got a lot of five Rhinos painted in funky camouflage schemes. I believe one of them is the Imperial Guard Fighting 9th Regiment Assault on Tsunami Reef scheme (rightmost one on the third row), and one other (pink&blue) seems familiar to me but I haven't found out if it's a stock scheme or not yet.

Pink&Blue

Pretty Señoritas too? Ay Caramba!

"Brother, look! They're aiming straight at us, I knew we should've gone with the woodland scheme!"

Side view

This is the one I think might be a guard vehicle

Blue not your thing? Worry not, green goes with pink just as good.

Good thing there's a first aid kit - with no seating and nothing to hold onto, the occupants are going to need it.

Those were the more or less stock built rhinos. The painting is cool and whimsical, but otherwise there's nothing odd about them. That's where these two come in:

A Recovery Vehicle!

Side

Wall-E, military configuration

That's right, a converted recovery vehicle! Admittedly it's painted in a thick reddish-brown scheme that kinda looks like vomit, but the actual conversion itself is very cool. And then there is our friend with the sad eyes (in this instance, they also shoot missiles). I've no idea what's it's been used as, but it's clearly a weapons platform of some sort. Tarantula maybe? Or Thunderfire Cannon, if those were already a thing back then. Well, whatever it is, it looks pretty cool to me.

In your end I'll bounce stasis...

Magic: The Gathering is a game that's one of those cultural cornerstones which I assume most people into the geekier arts (miniatures, RPGs, Boardgames etc.) are atleast aware of at some level even if they don't play it themselves. It's the first and most popular trading card game (Hell, it invented the whole genre) in existence, with millions of players. Like any other game it's not without it's problems though, the chief of which in my opinion is lack of reprints for certain staples (and infact the policy of never reprinting many of the best cards) and general speculation with the cards, feeding an all-consuming secondary market. This in turn leads to many people having fixation on card values ( which in all fairness is understandable in the sense that good decks in many formats cost more than used cars. Understandable or not though, it still poisons the atmosphere somewhat). What does this all have to do with anything, I hear you ask? I'll get to that in just a minute.

Like many I used to play Magic a lot (pretty much every week, often more than that), and like many I quit playing after some years. We used to play what's known as "Kitchen table magic" (I'm sure you can see where the name comes from), multiplayer games with no adherance to formats or banlists. This is fun if you have a good group. Both the upside and downside of that being that most kitchen groups are just that, groups of friends gathering at the kitchen table at someone's home. You get to hang out with your mates - great (I'm making the assumption that you like your mates here)! You will pretty much exclusively play against the same people, and after a while the same decks - mediocre.

Would you look at that, it's the same combo. Again.

This will eventually lead you outside. For those outings we usually played drafts and prereleases where you constructed your deck at the event. Wanting to branch out into other formats is what eventually drove me away - it was just way too expensive.

That brings us to the present. I've started again! I recently found a new format called Premodern (it's been played in Sweden for a few years but is just now gaining traction elsewhere), and was hooked. The format is much more affordable than many other formats (my deck cost me about 100€ to put together - in contrast to Legacy or Vintage for example, where you can expect to run several cards that cost more than double that. Remember what I said about the car? Yeah, it do be like that.). My deck  is a blue control deck revolving around an enchantement called "Stasis" and attempts to first freeze the opponent so they can't interfare with the deck, and then slowly whittle them away. Today I had the chance to play the deck in the format for the first time (earlier games were tests against my cousin's decks which didn't adhere to the Premodern cardpool). It, ah, did well. I won the tournament (it was a small one - only four of us so everyone played against everyone) 3-0 (matches going 2-0, 2-0 and 2-1 to me, matches being best out of three games). First match was against a blue/green creature/control deck, the second one against blue/white standstill and the last one against white rebels.

Maindeck on the left, sideboard on the right. Photo taken by Zuher Turbi.

The current decklist is:

Lands
19 Island
3 Forsaken City

Creatures
1 Chronatog

Instants
4 Chain of Vapor
4 Gush
4 Thwart
4 Daze
4 Opt
3 Arcane Denial
3 Impulse
3 Foil

Enchantments
4 Stasis

Artifacts
3 Black Vise
1 Feldon's cane

Sideboard
4 Hydroblast
3 Propaganda
2 Chill
2 Powder Keg
2 Submerge
1 Arcane Denial
1 Impulse

For now I'm completely in love with the deck, but I'll continue fidling with it for a while atleast. I'll propably also make other decks eventually, as I'm trying to get my friends interested, and I suspect always playing Stasis would lead to notable amounts of saltiness. It's a fun and awesome card... as long as you're not on the receiving end of it.

One Space Marine, Two Space Marines, Three Space Marines...

The subject of this post is counting. Specifically, counting painted miniatures. Last year I decided to start counting my painting to get an idea of what I manage in a year. This was inspired by many people in hobby groups doing similiar counts (from what I've seen seems to be a fairly common practice), and by my personal like of statistics of all kinds (I know it's weird, please don't hit me). Obviously I wasn't going to hit the awesome several hundred painted miniatures a year some people do, being a fairly slow painter, but I figured I'd give it a shot. Well, what was the count then?
Somewhat unimpressive, I must confess.

In 2018 I painted from scratch 47 miniatures, 5 of which were bigger vehicles or monsters, and finished, fixed, or touched up 138 second hand miniatures, 6 of which were bigger vehicles or monsters (I've bought several bigger lots last year). The amount of work done on each of those varies a lot, but most were on the smaller side, so I'm going to assign a calculatory value of 1/10 to each of these, arriving at calculatory total of 60 (rounding down) painted miniatures in 2018.

I think I'll aim for 100 for 2019. In other news, I've started a new project (not enough of those around, obviously) - Lizardmen. They were what first drew me to Warhammer, but what little I painted as a kid was horrible, and my cousin and (then) only opponent was more into 40k so they got boxed up and forgotten. Well, no more! I think I'll make a post on them when I finish the first unit. Well, that's that. Happy new year 2019!