Hobby Update: Herd Flaxhoof

My battle reporting is now up-to-date, so I am trying to catch up on hobbying posts before the year is over. I got stalled out in November, but since reorganizing have made some great progress. Up now is a legendary leader of the Herd, Flaxhoof, ready to lead some charging Centaurs!

The unit is a conversion I had been thinking of for the last few months as a way to tackle two interesting but missing heroic units from my Herd collection. He’s essentially the horse part of some RGD Centaurs, with the top half of a Warhammer Gor body. It looks a little top heavy, but it looks alright, works alright, and it’s done, so we’re calling it good!

One side.

The horse body and Gor body were actually pretty close for sizes. I cemented some additional chunks of plastic from discarded sprues to increase the height a bit, and then the upper body was attached to the horse body, using plastic cement, essentially melting it all together to get a strong connection. Green stuff was then pushed around to smooth out the connection, and then a day later, more green stuff was added for a fur effect. I am still pretty bad with green stuff, so it was still looking a little misshapen, so a final rope of green stuff was rolled out, twisted to look more like rope, and slung around the connection. A shield was then attached to the front to disguise the connection a bit more. The paintjob is all the usual stuff and colors for the Herd. I feel like I should decorate the gut shield more, but I wasn't sure on a pattern, so for now, it’s just a bland silver. 

A pretty boring gut shield, but I don't know what design I'd put there yet, so it's fine for now.

I haven’t liked the normal Centaur Chieftains much on the table. Yes, they are Mighty, they have Pathfinder, and have gets TC1, but you are paying a ton of points for something with just 4 attacks. The Centaur Chief has his uses, but is still only Def4 and still just Inspiring, so he’s not an auto-include, and hasn't solved any of my concerns with Inspiring and supporting my Herd army. In the right list though, Flaxhoof might be worth it, though 50 points feels like a very steep increase. For the cost increase, we get better Nerve, a bump up to 6 attacks, Fury, and a TC1 aura for all nearby Centaurs, which does include him.

I am late writing and posting this, but we tried him out already in Battle 098. Unfortunately, I did not play a strong game, and up along against a horde of Wights wounding him on 2’s, Flaxhoof in particular didn’t have a good debut. 

I think to get the most out of him, you need to be running other Centaurs and making use of his TC aura. Centaur Striders are still such a weird unit to me, so much so that I think I’d actually prefer to run him alongside Hunters, who have worse combat stats, but are Nimble and should therefore be able to be a bit more mobile and versatile, with the aura letting them punch more above their weight when they do commit to something. We'll see what the future lists end up being, maybe double Striders Hordes will be the way! The Herd is a tough army to play, but we’ll definitely try him out again in the future!