Hobby Update: Rebased Magnilde for Varangur

Up now is a rebased Magnilde for the mighty Varangur! I honestly had not planned on actually rebasing her properly anytime soon. I stuck her on a new 40mm base for some recent learning games though, and well ... ok, I'm intrigued, and she has earned a quick touchup, on behalf of the Varangur. 

Magnilde.

Nothing fancy happened with the hobbying. She was on a 25mm Mantic square, so I distressed the edges, trying to make it more of a slope, then added putty to build up a mound to help disguise the old base, and then added paste atop the putty to get a nice heroic hill thing going. Once all dried, I painted it up black, dark gray, and light gray, and then added more snow effect to match my army basing. The character was not touched up, but remains a Wizkids Orc gal, picked originally as the face looked similar to the Warmachine Skorn units I was using as my Varangur Fallen. 

From the front.

Leaving 3rd Edition, my Varangur had about 9,000 points of stuff. Being rolled into the master-list Northern Alliance now, many units do persist, but all of the units that made the Varangur really fun and unique - Draugr, various Magi, Jabberwocks, and cavalry options - are all voided or at best severely limited. In all, well over 2,000 points in my collection has been voided, and with the army-specific choices devastated or completely voided, the army is a shadow of its former self.

This is not to say the edition has fully killed them off generally - they definitely lost a lot of things, but a motivated hobbiest could do a lot with the faction still. Older Varangur Reavers and such transition easily to Half-Elf Berserker units, and Abyssal Dwarfs could be used as eeeevil frozen dwarfs with a darker take on the Alliance. There is plenty of proxying and hobbying that could be done, but I am just not motivated. They will see the table, but we are just going to be using the army as-is, with no additions planned.

From the side. 

But speaking-of, I did take the actual Varangur out for an inaugural stroll into 4th Edition and was intrigued. I wanted a more elite, fighty list to explore things with, and they delivered. Magnilde is a shadow of her former self, (who in turn pales to the ridiculous Herja of the Fallen from 2nd Edition). She's a combat Warlord, but without the fly or special rules, she's going to struggle a bit. I think many combat Warlords are going to be in similar rough spots though, as you need to get them into combats for them to be useful, but they aren't going to solo much by themselves, and you can only engage two-units per facing now, so sending multiple units in is almost always going to be the much better call. But I need her in order to unlock the two unique units the Varangur get. We'll just need to find her good fights and units to bully in the coming games. 

With the extra pivots, Fallen looked like good units, and getting Strider makes them very attractive, since those charges seem hard to come by for most armies. Limited to CS1 limits how hard they can carry, but it seems like they could find some good uses in lists, and probably do very well carving through core-tax infantry.

The Hearthguard Thunderers, formerly Mounted Sons, are knights. Relative to normal knights, say with the Kingdoms of Men, the Thunderers are cheaper by 5 pts, and have an extra Nerve. That's weird considering their vaunted formula, but a lot seems to have shifted this edition, and inter-army balance seems a little harder to gage. Even with the rules buffs, I think cavalry is going to be rarer on the battlefield to start out the new edition. So far it seems like heavy cavalry could be impactful, but needed a lot more finesse to pull off, since any hindered charge will blank their effectiveness. I feel like I'm only ever going to want to take one regiment of knights, and the J Boots will be mandatory for quite some time.

Overall, the new edition has dealt a very significant blow to my Varangur, but the army was still fun to play and seemed viable, albeit only as a very elite list now and few unique units. So I guess I'm mostly just discussing my collection. We probably have a points "sweet spot" to be run at now, where I'm maxing out the single Varangur battalion with all the fun stuff I want, but I haven't quite figured out where that would be just yet. More testing is needed!