A Relic of the Past

 I mentioned in one of the Nova posts that I wanted to upgrade my Eldar Vehicles and this is the start of it. Friday night after the GT I was pushing my display board up to the room and I was sharing the elevator with three other guys. One gave me props on my display board .. Thanks man.. while another looked at me and my board with a crappy smile on his face asked how many Wave Serpents? Just three... He sort of rolled his eyes at that .. I said hey man that is all the transports we really have .. he waited till I was out and the doors closing before he closed with .. what about the Falcon?  8\ .. Well..

It' only holds six
Isn't a dedicated transport so not objective secured
Takes up a valuable heavy slot
Isn't as survivable

Basically it's out classed as a transport and a gunship. It may be the chassis the Serpent and Prism are built on but it won't beat out either out for many reasons. So there you go elevator man! haha.. But .. that guy really has nothing to do with anything, it was just a funny story and it's relevant now because what am I using as my tank upgrade ginnie pig? That's right .. a Falcon. I want one in my tank depot to complete the group (and my original one looks ROUGH.. I repainted it more times than I can count trying to find my color scheme, thinking back now that original Falcon is where the paint scheme for my army came from haha.. wow this is a long side note... side note complete).

To upgrade the look of the tanks I want to blend them more. They are currently mostly solid blue and black with slight blending on the high spots. Most of them were painted about ten years ago so they were before the airbrush and no where near as smooth. I've done some updating on them over the years such as gems or colors. Wave Serpents have some bone panels, Prism's have red and Night Spinners purple. The old Falcon I have is pretty sad and didn't get any extra love. I'll have to figure out what color I want to use as it's other highlight color, it still needs to stay close to my Blue, Bone and Purple overall scheme .. though now thinking about it I could switch the Spinner to green and make the Falcons purple (I paint the Spinners guns greenish). But we aren't there yet ..

 I just blended the blue straight up with no mask and then masked the purple (that purple was going to be added to them all.. I haven't started on the highlight panel change or anything)..

 But... do you know what isn't fun?

 This .. this isn't fun in the least haha.. I only had about two hours of painting time in last night and I'd honestly say 60% of it was masking. 10% painting .. the rest was used somewhere hah cleaning, mixing,.. probably a lot of bitching about masking ..

 Once I had it masked up I went over the entire model again with black.

 Then started adding in the grey highlights.

 I didn't want to go overboard and make it too grey. It should still be black but with some weathering and highlighting.

 This is how it sits now, last night before I was done I hit it up with two coats of Floor Finish. I know it might sound crazy but it's a great working clear coat. I will spray this in between coats especially when I'm masking something. I mentioned this to John and Greg at Nova and they appeared to be as skeptical as I was when I first saw someone using it, but I highly recommend giving it a try. (I added a link to Amazon above). Next I'm going to paint some of the smaller areas black and then start on the white lines in the seams. More time consuming fun haha

 So far I think it's coming along nicely .. I'm also thinking about if I want to add some kind of design to the hull. I don't know if I want go too big though. I think they can look cool but with all the lines and broken up colors on my tanks it could look odd. I'm thinking about putting the infinity symbol on the side in the small black section by the blue and purple..  I may test that on the old beat up falcon to get an actual feel for the look without messing this up and then masking it up again .. If I do go with this look I have a lot of masking in my future.

I have:
4x Wave Serpents
2x Prisms
1x Night Spinner
2x Falcons (one I'm already masked and one that will sadly not move on to the next design haha)

and I want to pick up

1x Wave Serpent w/ Mark II kit from FW
Scorpion from FW
Lynx from FW
Warp Hunter from FW

sheesh...and I didn't even mention the Vypers I want to finish up 8)

Nova GT 2014

In addition to playing in the Trios I also threw down in the GT. I had no aspirations other then that my army would look cool. I might get my butt kicked but I can at least look good while it's happening haha..  This year I didn't read any of the missions or the new Dex's that came out, I just full on winged it. Never even tested the list haha.. I had a good time playing and met some very cool people..  I've pretty much posted all my pictures so sadly nothing new on that front. There were some pretty wild lists there this year and Knights were out in full effect.. 5 Knight lists, 3 Knights with 3 Riptides..  Some pretty strong lists..  but lets get into the games..

Game 1 - Necrons
Lost as we ran out of time and my reserves were only finally starting to come on. A close one at the end.

Game 2 - Wolves
I played Ben and we had a very cool game. Thankfully I had enough guns to kill his Thunderwolves before he could get to me and punch my face. haha.. My Flyers took out his gunship and after that I could use my speed to run and shoot giving me the win. Was a good fun game.. And was nice to hear about the new Dex from his POV.

Game 3 - CentStar
I played Kevin and got extremely lucky. He didn't get Gate or Invis so he was going to have a harder time getting his Cents up to do their damage. My gunline poured out the lead and took out enough of his mobility to give me the advantage. He was an awesome player and very cool guy.. I got the win taking me to 2 and 1. He originally brought the 3 Knight / 3 Riptide list but one of his friends wanted to play it. Was a good way to end the day, playing a very fun game and pulling out a win. We BS'd a little after the game about some of the top lists and jobs..

The first day was a solid day and while being tired I still had a little energy haha.. Sadly the third day wasn't to go as well..

Game 4 - Grey Knights / Knights
This was a very fun game and it went back and forth finally coming down to the last turns and a brutal fight in the middle. His Knight was guarding the Relic and I had to get some stuff in there and survive. I charged his Knight with the Wraithknight who completely wiffed.. then got stomped and died. The game continued and I needed my Wave Serpent and Dire Avengers inside to just survive. I knew it was going to be a tough one.. they didn't make it .. Was very fun and we had some people watching the fight at the end.. it was a nail biter haha.. great fun game..

Game 5 - Necrons/Inquistion/Deamons
Another tight fun game, Chris was very good and his list was tough. For everything I'd kill he'd replace it with a new squad of Daemons haha.. I couldn't keep up with the numbers he could put back on the board. And with it being a table quarter game he'd just drop them were needed! Halfway through the game I sat down and that was it .. The 8th game in 3 days was taking it's toll... My tank was now on empty haha. I tried to man up but most of my rolling was now performed from the chair. In the end I got all my secondaries making it closer then I thought it was going to be (I thought I was no where near that close) .. Ended up be 8-9 loss but again another awesome game with a good player.. was fun even with me running out of steam halfway through it. 8)

Game 6 - White Scars/Guard
I had nothing at all left for this game and was thinking of just quitting but figured that wouldn't be cool so I got a MTN Dew and bucked up as much as I could. It didn't even matter though .. My first two turns dice were Abysmal and his hand was Hot... he even apologized.. but thats luck and in a way it was good. I didn't have to think too much as there was no way I was going to come back. We BS'd about kids and Malifaux some and in the end I think he won 7 to 2 or 4 or something like that haha..

While we were playing Mike B came over and asked me to take my army to the back for detailed judging which was on one hand awesome and flattering but on the other TIRED.. 8) .. I pushed it back there and set it up and got to talk to a lot of cool people which was very cool. That is the part that I like the most about the events. Talk to people about the painting and hobby aspect or going back to the old days and talking about rules and editions past. Sadly I didn't get top three but wasn't really surprised. Some of my army is highly detailed but the Serpents were painted ... well some up to ten years ago and before the airbrush. I think one of my yearly goals is going to be to repaint all of them to a higher standard. The details are decent on them but there isn't as much blending as I would like.

Thursday and Friday night we all grouped up for dinner and it was another awesome time talking about all the old days haha.. Greg, Evan, Sean, Will, Chandler, Andrew and myself mixed between the nights. It's always fun to talk about what you've seen out there or how you did day or what crazy stuff that's been going on .. a good decompress. Then it's zombie walk back to the hotel and then bed .. exhausted. Well.. I'm sure all the younger guys go back and get into something else but for us 40+ guys it's night night time.

I wish I would have remembered to take more pictures but with everything going on I totally didn't have the time or completely forgot. Thankfully Greg was on hand taking a crazy amount of pictures. He posted some more today.. check them out!   You the man..

Thanks to everyone I played for the games and good times..

The Good, The Bad, The Hungry

This will be the first of a couple of posts about the NOVA Open 2014. This will mostly cover the Trios Event but will spill over to other days and points because it's pretty tough for it not to. I normally don't write longish posts but these probably will be more so.. SooooOOOOooooo..

The Good, The Bad and the Hungry
That was our Trios Team name and it consisted of Evan and Ron from FTGT and me (I talk to the FTGT guys a lot and it was great to actually meet Ron and Chandler in person). We had been going over multiple names and ideas since Evan had a tough time picking which army he wanted to take. He chose Crons and we had three of the armies that wouldn't team up EVER .. haha.. I mean they HATE each other with a passion (well I guess Nids hate everything other living thing equally but you know). So Evan came up with the idea of the The Good, The Bad and the Hungry which was a cool spoof off the Good, The Bad and the Ugly.. seemed like a good idea and I got to be Clint haha.. well at least in moniker. I matched up our image (above) to the originally movie poster and we had shirts made. Next was the display board. We all would have our own but we also wanted something to tie it all together. We were all pretty tight on time but I had the materials so set to work and I was pretty happy with the outcome for only putting a few hours in.

I matched the final scene of the movie where the three face off.. including the three and two graves .. So we placed our three leaders on the board staring each other down. Greg from Feed Your Nerd took a ton of pictures and let me use some of them that were of our team. If you haven't checked out his site I'd recommend it! Here are some of the pictures..

And a link to some of the other ones.. The Good, The Bad and the Hungry Trios Pictures.. Thanks Greg!

I also met John Stiening from 40K Hobby Blog which was very cool. Sometimes I feel like I live in a hole, since changing jobs last year I don't have the time to check out all the blogs and sites I should and if you haven't checked out John's blog go there now! He's an amazing painter and he cleaned up this year in the Crystal Palette. He took multiple medals but topped it off with Best of Show. Congrats! Your work was amazing.

I had a great time in the Trios playing some very cool people and it was a nice chill atmosphere where we were all joking and having a good time! We definitely weren't the champions on wins but I did win this..

 And we won the best Paint/Theme/Displays .. Sadly we don't have the plaques or prizes yet. There was a mix up with the award and they called another team. Saturday night before I was about to leave and was in the process of packing everything up when one of the Trios Judges came over and asked if I was going to be at Nova on Sunday. I was going home that night and really thought I wasn't going to be able to come back for the last day..  three days were already a lot to ask my (super) wife when the kids had just started at preschool and she was handling drop off and pock up duties! He said we won the Paint/Theme/Display award and he'd love for us to all be there to accept the award, So I said I'd see what I could do. The next day Evan told me I also won a medal, when I told my (awesome) wife that I won she said I should go down and accept the award knowing we had worked hard on it. I'd be there ...

I drove back down to DC and hitting traffic as always had to park at the hotel. I went in and found Evan and ChandleRon (haha). We Sat through the awards and when the Trios came up they called me for the Medal but not the Team for the Paint/Theme award, they called someone else. That was a rough one .. I sat there thinking I know he said we won last night .. maybe they mixed up the awards. So as the ceremony was coming to an end I went and talked to the judge. He looked pretty upset and when I told him which one was ours he told me that yes we were the winners but someone had marked it down wrong. He hoped up and tried to find the other team who had already left. He was very apologetic about it and seemed to be taking it very hard. I guess he remembered I drove down for it and wanted us to get the recognition for the win. They are going to get replacement plaques made and replacement prize support then contact us. It really was a bummer but people make mistakes and I totally understand they have a lot going on. It will be fixed and we DID WIN!! awesome .. Next year I'll be back for the Trios for sure .. it really was my favorite event that I played in. I liked the team aspect and the was cool working on a team theme. I'm already thinking about what new cool stuff can be done for next year! 8)

When the plaques come in I'll post them up..