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!

Another bright eyed youth chosen by the thug life

This weekend I finally managed to take the time to convert and paint a mini for the latest addition to the Slayers, a juve named Anthea. She's been proxied by another, dead, juve for the last two matches because I didn't have a mini for her, but that's sorted now.

Front

Back

It's a fairly simple conversion, just a weapon swap and new hair and skirt from green stuff/milliput (I mix them together, gets the best of both worlds). The skirt ended up a bit on the scrappy side, but overall I'm pretty happy with it. Besides, it's not like they have good clothes in the underhive anyway, right? That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

The original miniature

Front before paint

Back before paint

This is the first time I've ever done anything but basic assembly or slot filling, etc.with either green stuff of milliput (My previous conversions have pretty much all been kitbashes, bit swaps or pose changes, which don't require any sculpting - such as it is), and I definately feel like I've learned more about it. Still very difficult though, and I continue to be baffled by the stuff some people put out. The skirt turned out a bit rough, and kinda looks like some sort of weird puffy trousers when viewed from the front, but the hair turned out much better. 

The season of lethargy

The season of merriment is upon us once again. Unfortunately in Finland it's also the season of darkness, cold, darkness, wet and darkness, and all of their lovely variants such as cold darkness or cold and wet darkness. Some people are affected by this while others aren't. Alas, I am part of the former rather than latter group, and as such have had my energy sapped and spirit stamped by the cruel mother nature. I always get borderline lethargic during autumn and winter, and consequantely haven't had much drive for anything really, including my hobbies. The only painting I've done is some Roomans (more on those in a future post once I have them all painted) and some fixes on the Eldar army. I do follow things though, and I'm pretty happy with the combined rulebooks being released for Necromunda. I already have the gang war books, but I'll be getting the new ones as well due to the convenience factor. December White Dwarf was packed with extras aswell, Delaques rulebooklet and  extra cards for several games, including Dice Masters (which I also play), which was pretty nice. The card is actually pretty good too.

The White Dwarf himself - and he's angry at you!

I also got another game of Necromunda in a couple of weeks ago which was nice. Won this time.

Suzy and the Slayers faced off against their old foe, the bounty hunter posse going by the name Aver's Gits as they were trying to escape through Slayer territory. Aver himself sneaked off right away, leaving his associates to fend for themselves. The Slayers held their positions, peppering the escaping bounty hunters with las and slug at every turn. The damage, though, was light. Despite several wounded only Borg went out of action, choking on a gas trap set by May. On the other side of the zone Lefty proved himself not above kicking a girl when she's down, putting Fio out cold. She survived, but needs resting. Seeing their leader leave them and their comrades bleeding out, the Gits broke and bottled out. Despite being victorious the Slayers felt like they gained little (most of which was bruises). The Gits however had their reputation swell for survivng against the mighty Slayers.

This time there was more terrain.

Kasumi, May and Anja guarding one of the chokepoints the Gits needed to pass through.

Trouble in the Underhive

Suzy and the Slayers faced the off against the Red Groin Rags from House Orlock. Despite deployement rivaling any Imperial bureaucrat and even the House leaders sending the gang a new Juve Anthea, the rags quickly found better firing positions than the slayers and proceeded to pepper them with waves of pinning weapons fire and all too many explosions. Ripper Jack De Felici managed to drop Kasumi after entagling her with his chains. The favour was soon returned though when Helga flattened Smokes Del Giorno with her heavy stubber. Anja spent most of the encounter locked in long range duel with Autogun Edwin, receiving much more than she gave in return, fortunately staying on her feet despite several bullet wounds. Unfortunately for the slayers Iron Hand Di Bernardi blasted Rosa and Irina off their heels with his blasting charge. When this was followed by underhive fauna (lured in the by the Groin Rags' unwashed loincloths) beating Eri senseless, Suzy made the wise and prudent choice to advance to better defensive positions and the gang legged it, leaving the worthless wasteland to the Orlocks. Luckily enough, only Irina was forced into bedrest with everyone else making a full recovery.

"Pinned" was the word of the day.

 Yesterday I had a Necromunda game at my FLGS - there's a store campaign going on for the control of the Myhr Manz sector of Underhive (Tietäjät tietää - an ancient finnish proverb). I was facing off against Red Groin Rags from House Orlock. The orlock player won the roll off and got the better table edge and caused me great problems with his grenade launcher, but I held my own until my girls started getting pinned left and right and dropping like flies and after getting three gangers and one champion out of action (luckily none of them were permanently maimed or died) and one ganger severely wounded I decided to cut my losses and bottled. Fair's fair and I lost - my gang was weaker (not by much though, to be fair) and made some errors I could have avoided (deployed Helga and her Heavy Stubber in the wrong spot for example, which lead to many turns of wasted shooting), but I do think out terrain was working against me a bit. There was a Killteam game going on at the same time as our match and they had arrived earlier and taken most of the suitable terrain, which left our board somewhat lacking in height and with wide open areas which meant it was difficult for me to close the distance and favoured the opposing gangs well entrentched shooters. Fun was had though, which is the main thing, and luckily none of the ladies dies. Now I just need to paint a new Juve before the next match!

Wooden Boxes

Another quick update, this time on another awesome second hand model. I just got it varnished (just to be sure), so I thought I'd share it with you guys. I present to you, a Khorne Berzerkers / World Eaters rhino:

Notice anything yet?

"Nice greenstuffing there, but what makes this so special?", you may ask. Well, first of it's completely scratch built. Secondly, it's made out of wood. I bought this from the same guy I got the Rogue Trader Dreadnought that made an appearance in the earlier post (also bunch of variant armour marines, but I haven't painted those yet). It was made by a friend of his back in the day who had quit the hobby and given all his stuff to the guy I bought it from. I don't play chaos or have chaos army (anymore - I had a second hand Chaos Space Marine army but I didn't have time for them and they didn't really tickle my fancy so I sold most of them to a friend). I have a couple of units, but that's it. Anyway, this was too cool to pass up in my opinion.

See? Wood.

Now, I fall firmly on the "if it's there you're supposed to paint it" camp when it comes to stuff like bottoms of tanks, so the bare plywood does elicit bit of a cringe from me, but in this instance I'm not going to do anything but the already completed varnish for the model. I don't want to tamper with such a cool old scratch build.