Showcase: Rebased my Dark Elves Army

 

Just a little in-between thing concerning my own Fantasy collection: With all he hooplah about The Old World around the turn of the year I decided to finally rebase my good old Dark Elves.

Painted them about 20 years ago when I got into warhammer fantasy for a second time, then based "to fit the army" rather than gaming tables or opponents' armies. Which of course is a weird thing to do, but I was more young than practical.

Here's a shot of my army's last major outing in 2015 for a Kings of War test game:

Way in the upper left there, snow-and-dark-rock bases.

...and now they hopefully go better with various green gaming tables. I left the painting as it is, with one small exception - the witch elves were eight so far; now they're 27, although I cheated and added the two guardians of the Cauldron of Blood, a cheerleader (they're going for stupid money on the internet, as I saw yesterday ) and another plastic sorceress from 2010 to get the unit to 27. But even without cheating it's still a nice block of 24 figures. Because everyone needs a cheerleader in their ranks. Painting is kept very simple; just so that they match the rest of the army painted 20(!) years ago. Concerning the witch elves- yes, those are the ones from 4th edition. I had a bit of a crush on the 4th/5th edition dark elves back then, even if they're not objectively incredibly pretty. I was also happy with the 2000 dark elf range, with two exceptions: the hydra (and the dragon, compared to the 4th edition dragon). They're too iconic) and the witch elves. They were too thin and too 'ripped' for my tastes, and the hair just wasn't even remotely comparable to the glory of the hairstyles on the 4th edition witch elves.

I also like the new plastic witch elves (although they don't even come close to their Marauder counterparts in terms of hairstyle). But they hadn't been released then, so a bunch of years ago I bought a lot of the Marauder witch elves when I had the chance. 


Of course, the standard-bearer of the Cold One Knights was added later as well; it must have been very soon after the release of that box, so 2010? 2009? I don't know.

A few days later I even added little pennants to the Dark Riders. 

...and look at this! Only 20% of horses are lacking their tails! That's not a bad ratio for a Warhammer army of that age.

You can also clearly see that the Dark Riders unit in the left was painted a bit later than the one in the right. Quite a different tone of purple there. But that's okay. Anyway, from this we can learn that when ever you got a figure with a lance, riding on anything, a pennon, no matter how simple, will make it look more magnificent. It's very silly, but I get a lot of joy from these pictures for some reason. 

I don't have an exact plan for what I'm going to do with them, but at least that's done now. It's been on the to-do list for a good while now. I still have a few things in reserve (remaining plastic cold one knights box, another complete metal chariot and the three boxes of fat stuff that came out from GW [new hydra, new cauldron with show stairs, new black dragon]. I bought those a few years ago in case they disappeared with Warhammer. Didn't happen anyway, but having something like that is better than not having it. )

Btw, the sorceress (in the army photo with the corsairs on the front left) always looks like the one on the left in my head.Same with the witch elves. Of course.

Spurred on by my initiative there my mate Virago, ever-keen to get his Oldhammer figures out, instantly painted 1000pts of High Elves and challenged my DElves for a game of 5th edition Warhammer. I since ordered a 5th edition boxed set which should arrive this week and will keep you posted about further developments