Well, its time to kick off the Tale of Two Armies with the first boxes of minis being opened and assembled, most now ready for the feverish days of painting ahead. As you might have guessed by my first post I started with my Zombies, which will form the main body of my Vampire Counts. Because of the huge drain a new army can put on anybody’s budget I spent the first few weeks scouring the internet and ebay for a cheap way to fill the order for the eventual 200+ Zombies my army will need. GW was the first place I checked, but even with the discount our game store offers to members it was going to set me back over $350 just for this unit and at 3 pts a model that was not a point to dollar ratio that I was liking. Ebay offered no real solution as most of the deals I found featured painted models which takes away from the fun of what we are doing. Finally I turned to the best place possible, user reviews and forums to find a solution. That’s when I stumbled across the company Mantic.
Mantic is a game company much like GW, it has created both fantasy and scifi games all in the important 28mm heroic scale. One of the armies for their fantasy game, Kings of War, was undead and it featured box sets of zombies. The regiments contained what in my mind were the quintessential zombies; no weapons, clothing that looked like it had been rotted off and falling apart and the hunched shuffling form that reminded me of the zombie movies I grew up watching. Another bonus was price point, with 30 zombies in a box at roughly the same price as the GW 20 zombie box it was a no brainer way to fill out the cheap endless hordes of zombies I plan to field.
I have already purchased 5 of these boxes to start my army off, a thing that I will probably grow to hate after I start painting them. I am planning to finish this off by kit bashing some of the GW zombies in, as well as just assembling some of the GW models. The models so far have been everything I had hoped for, excellently sculpted and easy to assemble. The only downside to going this route with my army is if I ever decide to go to a GW sponsored tournament I will have to chose a different army or buy and paint a bunch of new zombies.
