The First Miniatures I Ever Painted

Cleaning Out the Closet

Last night I started cleaning out that closet behind me. Look what I found—the very first miniature I ever painted! I remember thinking this was the first unique I ever pulled, and I slammed him in every army.

You can see I have him, his buddy that I also repainted, and this polka-dotted one… I honestly don’t know what I was thinking there. These are the first three miniatures I ever painted. I didn’t think I still had these—I thought they were lost to time.

My First Army

So this unique was the strongest healer I had. This figure actually kind of sucks, but she had an ability that shared her defense value with these two trolls. They were slow but had 12 range. The other guy moved eight and could hit hard in melee—obviously had to paint those.

The Wraith Era

The Wraith was my second unique from a booster box. She’s dry brushed white! Even after I stopped playing these guys, I had her in everything. It turned out she was the best model—I stumbled into a meta list.

My area was pretty competitive. Even before the internet existed, the meta naturally emerged. I literally pretty much played the Wraith in everything.

Range Death Stars

After that, it was all about range Death Stars. Stormbrand with magic enhancement, mages in the back who could shoot through allies and couldn’t be shot. Flame lightning death star stuff.

I loved the orcs. These two are my favorite figures. I would play two different mage blasters—90-ish points here, a little over 100 there. I learned very quickly to put the chaos mage in front because he’d lose mage blast and I’d screw myself.

The Tournament Days

At this point I was playing tournaments almost every day of the week. After I got the Chaos Mage, I was always playing him. I started adding in the 120-point guy—armies were 200 points—and you have your range base while he gets up close.

But stuff like Gryphon flyers would come in, roll for breakaway, do one damage, shake off, and I’d just keep getting wrecked by those.

When I Got Good

Right around when Sinister came out, I started to get really good. I had Keeper Cairo who was a bounding shooter—crazy at the time. I had all the Solomon, all the Draconum. I was full-on in the meta playing the toughest things.

I had Wandering Butch—very rare, very cool figure. I lost him in the sword trip but had to buy him back because I couldn’t not have him.

At this point, armies would be four or five figures that were just really good and could take on all comers.

The Auto-Damage Meta

It was all about auto damage. Ram, duo click, venom. Waiver was good because of venom. Then when I was playing for fun, the Summoner came out—he has Force March, so first turn I would literally run the whole group up.

I’d pass my second turn because I’d get so much more information from watching everyone else move into position. Kind of cheesy, but effective.

The Fun Army

My fun army had three healers. The poor little volunteer guy would be in front. The Chaos Mage could bust off at whatever needed killing with ram and sweep and command—sometimes getting two or three extra actions a turn.

He could ignore line of sight and roll d6 for damage with plus two. Lowest possible was three, highest was eight. With three healers, he was never going to die. Still pretty cutthroat even as a fun army.

The Nostalgia

This game is just so fun. I’m having such a happy time reminiscing. I need to get this collection out on a shelf somewhere so I can look at it and be happy about it. It’s also nice that you don’t have to paint Mage Knight—you can just look at it and enjoy it.