Matt Gee Minis

I have always had a soft spot for Celts. The idea of those wild people from the North West of Europe, their "fingers up to authority" feeling against the Romans etc. I toyed for a while with trying to make an historical army but never really found a system or players local enough to me to consistently play it. The recent swell in mini agnostic games that are designed to be so has changed that. I was after some javelin throwers for my slowly growing Kings of War Northern Alliance list. This is intended to be my slow burn and use the models I love so what better place than to get some of those Celts I always fancied assembled and painted.  I like models to be simple enough to be functional but still have plenty of visual interest to paint. Scouring the options from vendors such as  Foundry ,  Perry ,  oldschoolminis , ebay and facebook trading groups I couldn't find anything that fitted the lead cast approach so turned to plastics. I think I must secretly be an airfix ...

Fall in Recruits! I have assembled a fair few plastic kits over the years but in recent years have been reverting to lead and metal recently to paint up my KoW Ogres. I favour single models while although they may lack variety in poses they stop me sticking my fingers together and cursing at the number of evil mould lines to remove. Assembling a small force of 15-20 models max should be OK though and the poses and weapon combinations will be essential. A quick mention on the quality of the minis. I've not been around the Deadzone scene for long but I did pick up some Nameless models to use in my Mantic-centric Trident Realm army to use as depth horrors. They were soft PVC and while they painted up OK with some drybrushing and washes I wouldn't say I was falling over myself to buy more of them. The GCPS sprues are all high quality hard plastic with good levels of definition and depth. The mould lines are a lot nicer to deal with than the restic or PVC of other Mantic minis ...

Both the regular army and mega army come with a shoal of Naiads to contend with. In both cases they are provided as part of the large cardboard boxed sets and within this are individual bagged on sprues of 5. Interestingly the sprues contain the arms, legs heads command bits and weapons. The bodies themselves (and a mysterious extra part to be explained later) all come lose and pre clipped from their frames. There is one exception to this being a leg and torso combo that comes in two parts. This made me feel a little uneasy as it reminded me of days gone by where I would twist (!) models from sprues before I learnt of clippers. However they have managed it though, Mantic have ensured that there is enough material left not to impact the sculpts.  There are more than enough heads to go round but as with the other mantic hard plastics I’ve seen the arm combos are exactly the number you need. I have no idea what I’ll do with all the extra heads but I’m sure I’ll figu...

Now everything’s arrived I can slightly belated end start talking about what all the goodies look like. I’ll take each box in turn and give my unasked for opinion on first impressions, quality etc. It’s my first really foray into Mantic produced minis so I was intrigued by the packaging they arrived in. Being used to small blisters and boxes of sprues or polystyrene separated metal parts I was met with cardboard boxes, bags of metal and what appeared to be large DVD cases. Undaunted I pressed on.  I’ll start with one of the first boxes that turned up, the water elementals. They came in one of the plastic boxes and inside were bagged up in zip lock bags with some thin foam padding and 50mm MDF bases. The bases are pretty straight forward and I’ll be putting them aside as I plan to multibase everything I can so I won’t bother assessing them in depth. They’re squares. I prized open the seals and tipped out the contents of the elementals.  The first thing i not...