This miniature ending up painted at all is a bit of a story.
There's no denying that the "Lone Op Guy" is a great support piece. He has a reactive move, Lone Operative makes him difficult to shoot, and if your opponent does get a glove on him, Stealth and a 5+ Feel No Pain screws up your opponent's math.
However, there's lots of Space Marine Lieutenants, and so when playing at my local game store and one-day events I opted to use the Phobos Lt out of the Vanguard box:
And it's been like that for all of 10th edition. My local tournament organiser doesn't care, and neither does anyone else, if you consider the only difference between the two models is one has a combi-flamer and the other doesn't.
But when I was building lists for Tinyhammer, a 750-point event operated by a stricter TO, they saw my Phobos Lt. as a proxy and told me I'd need to bring the real model.
So, I set aside a day and painted him. I was a little bit lazy with the carapace, painting the model, applying a wash, and then highlighting it. This was because I didn't want to go and buy more purple paint for a component of a model that would never come up again.
I call this method the "two step" – and whilst it appeared too dark initially, a little bit of magic matte varnish flattening the dark and the light and it looks pretty good.
I'm still not thrilled with the model – I had to cut him out of the base topper and find a tactical rock – which isn't difficult, but cutting him from the topper was – and I am not fond of models with enemy bits on them, because they tell a story of only fighting that faction, when he's going to be fighting everyone.
The tragedy of this (relatively minor) expended effort is that not long after I finished painting him, I had to re-adjust my 750 point army to take advantage of the extra 40 points freed up by the balance changes implemented by Games Workshop.
In went my company heroes, and out came the Lone Op guy.
Womp womp.
However, Tinyhammer is happening on the weekend on the 5th and 6th, so look forward to the report from that, and I took the field with a Dark Angels Gladius Task Force list at Grim Series on the weekend, and will do up a report for that soon.
Catch you next time,
Vulkan
