I had a plan to write a year-end review of 2020 with all the projects I finished, I even started writing a lengthy post about it that I meant to finish … but here we are in mid-February and I didn’t finish. Part of that delay was mustering the willpower to haul out the lightbox and take some shiny pics of my minis which I didn’t manage to do until last night. Instead of a 2020 review post, I’m going to give each project it’s own post. Because they deserve it! These will not be posted by in any kind 2020 sequential order. First up, the dark elves!

The dark elves have been sitting around in my Pile of Potential for quite some time. I think I bought them back in 2019 when I found them for sale unboxed but unbuilt at the bits in of my friendly local game store. I stocked up on bits from bits sellers and bits from friends and finally got them built and painted at the tail end of 2020. The team features several conversions, even if it’s just a simple headswap because I prefer my teams to avoid repeat poses whenever possible.

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For me, four blitzers are a must-have on a starting dark elf team. While there are more unique players on the dark elf roster, the dark elf team is the only elf team to allow four blitzers and starting off with that much block is really helpful. The GW box only comes with two blitzers and I didn’t want to buy a second box and be left with a bunch of minis I don’t need, so I got a little creative. Blitzer No. 2 has a dark elf blitzer torso on elven union blitzer legs. It took a fair bit of cutting and filing to get the two bodies to work together, but they came together in the end. Since that meant I had a spare pair of dark elf blitzer legs, I experimented and found I could fit the torso of the female lineman on them. The female lineman torso is a little small and femine and the blitzer legs feature some serious booty, but them together and the result is she’s a little dummy thicc as the kids say these days. To tie them all together as one cohesive position, I gave them all Idoneth Deepkin heads from the Age of Sigmar range. The helmets fit in with the nautical look of the dark elf team, but has the unfortunate side effect of making them look like a certain TMNT villain.

Dark elf teams feature runners rather than throwers and catchers. One runner I built as the standard build, but for the other runner I used the dark elf runner legs, a wood elf wardancer torso, dark elf runner arms, and the head is from the high elf Shadow Warrior kit from the Age of Sigmar range. You can’t see it well in this photo, but the head has a cool scar across his right eye that gives him quite a bit of personality.

Now, the true stars of the dark elf team, the witch elves! These psychopathic females are what really make the dark elf team the most unique. These expensive players start with frenzy and dodge so are both a threat on offense and defense. You can level them up quickly and once they have block they are quite a handful. Many find the witch elf’s pose to be divisive. It certainly doesn’t convey agility, grace or a psychopathic murder frenzy, but since I know the character of this position, I like the juxtaposition of the player calmly standing on the field, knowing full well the rage that burns within. Even though I like the pose fine, it doesn’t mean I want both of my witch elves to look the same! For the second witch elf I used an Age of Sigmar Khinerai without her wings or tail. I used arms from the BB dark elf witch elf and shoulder pads are from the Age of Sigmar Melusai kit. I knew I needed somewhere to place her player number, so I clipped off the armor bit of a meulsai tabbard and glued it on to her back as a backplate. I have them both heads from the khinerai kit to tie to two models together as the same position.

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Last up the linemen. Not much to say here except three of them got head swaps. The heads come from the Age of Sigmar dark elf corsairs and the female head is from the dark eldar wyches from the 40k line.

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Here some WIP shots of me bashing these minis together complete with my amateur green stuff work. Eventually I’d like to add the Forge World dark elf assassins to complete the team. That’s another unique position to the dark elves that I rarely take because I rarely have any luck with the Stab skill. But it would be nice to have the option and for completion sake.

Post Script: I forgot to talk about the color scheme! Since I started painting my elf teams in professional soccer team colors with the wood elves (Celtic) and elven union (Arsenal) I went down the same road with the dark elves. In the fall of 2019 we went to Milan, Italy, and while there I went and saw an Inter Milan game with my brother-in-law. It was a lot of fun and I’ve since fallen in love with the teams black and blue striped jersey. That became my inspiration! The Inter logo also features some gold in it, but I felt like that was throwing off the overall tone of my team so I switched all the metallics to silver. Instead of using white, I used a more light-blue gray instead.