Hobby Update: Herd Lycan Alphas

 Up now are some Lycan Alphas for the Herd!

Both of the new heroes.

The models are Fey Werewolves from WizKid’s Critical Role line. I’ve had my eye on these for a while, but could never find them in the local shops, so ordered them via an online shop as a little treat to myself a few weeks back. The minis come “pre-primed”, but I had to scrape a lot of mold lines on them, and so I ended up waiting to for the Wisconsin weather to trend in a favorable direction and priming them again before hobbying them up recently.

One, with a green tunic.

The sculpts are a little weird. They have the “mane” approach for the hair, but from the promotional pictures, it also seems like the sculptor wanted to show that the body was furry too, with some fur textures on the torsos and such. The sculpt didn’t take those details at all though, so following the rest of my arctic Herd, I went with my usual “Andorian” painting scheme, with light blue skin and white hair.

The other, with a purple tunic. Hopefully this can differentiate them on the field for my opponents.

The Alphas have comparable units in a lot of other armies, such as the Northern Alliance Snow Troll Prime (120 points) or Thegn on Frostfang (125), or the Ogre Sergeant (110) or the Undead Lykanis (150). Large Infantry and Monster-sized single entity units abound. All of these examples have comparable combat stats. All Inspire. Some even regenerate. But the Lykanis and Alphas have incredible speed, increasing both of their prices dramatically, though the  Alpha still takes the cake as the most expensive of the bunch here, coming in at a tough-to-swallow 160 points.

Nimble single entity units show up in a lot of armies and popular with a lot of generals, as they provide some amazing utility (decent combat stats, unexpected charges, additional sources of Inspiring, even contributing unit strength to help score scenarios…), but the Alphas might actually be too expensive to be worthwhile. Unless one is consistently making some very long charges with them, something like the Snow Troll Prime can do similar things for 40 points less! That's quite a premium to pay. Speed and Pathfinder will need to be utilized well to get the most out of them. Testing is needed to see how worthwhile they actually are on the table, and hopefully I’ll get some testing in soon!