Friday 6 December 2013

Return to Mirkwood!

About a year and a half ago I started painting up an Elf force to play through the Fall Of The Necromancer Campaign for Lord Of The Rings with my friend Stan.  We played through a couple of scenarios but then real life got in the way, I started working in a different area, and we got a little derailed. 

Earlier this week Games Workshop posted their pre-order info for their new Hobbit miniatures and there were a TON of awesome new elf figures.

I want to get a pile of these but I'm putting it off for a week or two and in addition to showing what I'll be painting next I thought this would be a great opportunity to talk about why I'm deferring my purchases slightly and my thoughts on miniature pricing (trust me, it goes hand-in-hand).

When new figures come out, especially from Games Workshop or Privateer Press the first thing that usually happens is a bunch of people jump up and start moaning about the prices.  Now I wouldn't make a statement as ridiculous as saying price is irrelevant but lets keep in mind what exactly we're talking about here; miniature war gaming is a first-world luxury purchase based pastime, no one is forcing you to buy more miniatures or to replace the old miniatures you already own, those are your choices.  Having said that I found myself thinking the new elves we're a bit too pricey for me and I probably wouldn't buy them...that thought actually caught me off-guard, I've never decided not to buy something solely based on price before, where did that idea come from?  And that's when I realised why I thought they were too expensive, because I still have a bunch of unpainted elf figures.  It has nothing to do with price difference from last year, or figure counts in boxes, it just felt like bad value to me because I still had stuff for that collection I wasn't already getting full use out of.  It's funny how all the figures I've gotten use out of feel like great value for my money but all the ones sitting unpainted in boxes feel like a waste, huh?

So to that end I'm going to paint my last 16 unpainted Lord Of The Rings Elves (shown below) and then I'm going to get started on the new Hobbit Elves.



Anybody else out there excited about the new Hobbit miniatures?

-Jay

6 comments:

  1. I am! I'm going to try and play all the scenarios from the new book with Ian.
    And those Mirkwood Rangers are ridiculous. They get extra attacks for additional opponents beyond the first. No swarming them!

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  2. some of the best elf figs ever!

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  3. Already working on the bases for mine! Very excited about this wave of miniatures!

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  4. The Warriors of Dale are nice -- very unique and distinct from other LoTR figures.

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    1. ...also makes me want to break out my Moria Dwarves and have a scrap.

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    2. The cool thing is it's easy to supplement your existing dwarves with a new character or two and have it feel like an updated force. And if you picked up The Hobbit box game you get Thorin's Company for tons of new character models.

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