KingdomCon is a month away now, and I'm trying to get prepared for it. First of all, I'm trying to decide on the lists that I'm going to play. Second, I want to get all of the models painted that I'm going to be using. At this point, I'm only going to be playing in the 50 pt tournament on Saturday, but I'm tempted to go down Friday night and play in the 35 pt theme list tourney at midnight. We'll see though.
I've been playing Mercs relatively exclusively for the last 6 months or so, and I've got a few favorite casters. Namely, Ashlynn, Gorten, and Durgen are my favorites. However, I recently picked up Shae and all his pirates, Bart, Damiano, and Constance Blaize.
Right now, I'm fairly certain that Broadsides Bart will be my second caster because he creates a tough problem for my opponents with his high armor. In general, his list is going to be 3 heavy jacks, Wrongeye and Snapjaw with a Bull Snapper for even more armor, and Kayazy and solos to fill the rest of the points. The particulars of his list depends on what my primary list is. I want it to be able to do ranged and melee so that I don't have a lot of glaringly terrible matchups. So my initial thought was Durgen for ranged control, and then a crapton of Steelheads and Nyss. The idea here is that Durgen plus Nyss provide the ranged control, while the Steelheads provide a strong melee component that can deal with high armor or high defense thanks to Primed. However, strong ranged armies like Cygnar and Menoth have been giving me some issues with Durgen, so I may not stick with him. However, I'm going to be practicing with Dave Henry and others at "The Chamber" later today. If I still don't like how Durgen is performing for me, I may switch Durgen out for Ashlynn. This will change my Bart list up some (i.e. losing Wishnailer and Rocinante), but that list will still do what it was essentially designed for, i.e. being high ARM and tough to deal with.
So now on to the painting aspect. Thankfully, most things that I have in my Ashlynn list are already painted (i.e. Nyss, Forgeguard, Gun Mages, etc), so that will make things easy. However, before this week, most of Durgen's army was still not fully painted.
Last night, I managed to seal up and flock my 16 Steelhead Halberdiers:
Also, before I started on the Halberdiers, I did a fair amount of work on my Steelhead Cavalry:
The bases for these guys are done and sealed just so that I could have the front arcs marked for practice games. Stannis is also assembled and primed, but he's not in the list, so I haven't really done too much to him. The whole Steelhead contingent looks pretty cool together though, that's for sure.
Another model that I've had done for a while, but haven't photographed before now was my Wishnailer model (at least, I think that's the case. I'm too lazy to go back and look it up though). Anyways, he was one of the first models that I started using the zenithal priming on. I'm pretty happy with how his skin and robes came out though. If I ever get better at painting jewels, I'll probably go back and actually paint the ones on him.
On to the works in progress. First, eAlexia:
Her base right now is bland and uninspired, but I'll try and figure something out. Gameplay wise, anybody that can up her DEF to ridiculous levels is great IMO. I've only playtested her with Ashlynn, but I could see her being good with Fiona and Damiano as well.
Next up, Rocinante:
This is my conversion to put the kit onto the metal model. I left off the chains since I couldn't make them fit, but the model exudes character to me. Plus he's amazing with soooo many casters. I love him with Bart, Damiano, and Ashlynn. I haven't tried him with anybody else yet, but I could see him being great with Fiona too.
Another new release from Wrath, the Eliminators:
I haven't really used them much, but their stats are ridiculous. Anyways, I know I've shown them before, but it was a terrible picture, so this is to make up for that.
And last but not least, my gators:
I know that I owned them before, and then sold them. I feel like I'm really getting a lot better use out of them this time though. Partially, it's because of Spiny Growth in Mercs. The other part is making Cryx lists that aren't as overwhelmingly full of infantry, which seems like blasphemy to me, but whatevs. As I mentioned last time, I was trying to replicate what popgoestheworld did with his award winning warhog and other little piglets bases (
found here). In terms of skin tone on Snapjaw, I'm going for something like this:
I found this pic on the
Tennessee Aquarium website, but it really has an interesting color to it, which I like. So yah, we'll see if I can replicate it.
Anyways, that's all I've got for now. Stay tuned in the next 4 weeks for even more painting, and maybe even some battle reports. I've got pics of a game that Micah and I had, Shae tier 4 vs. Calaban at 35 pts. It was a blast with lots of ups and downs in it.
Until next time.
