MODELLING: Blood Angels Tactical squad one

A fantastic but nerve-wracking game at St James Park yesterday as Newcastle edged out Wigan 1-0. We threw everything at them and had two goals disallowed, hit the woodwork and played the best part of 45 minutes against 10 men. It took a towering header(!) five minutes from time from Michael Owen to win us the match. This was the kind of game we would have drawn or even lost last season. I hope it's a sign of things to come for the Toon.

Back to the gaming. I have put together the first of two Tactical squads for my Blood Angels army. These models came from the Battle for MaCragge boxed set. I didn't have any choice in how to arm these models; there is a missile launcher, flamer and the sergeant has a chainsword and bolt pistol. I'm okay with this because I know I'll use these weapons in my future army lists.

They are obviously aimed at younger/beginner players because they only have three parts per model and they all snap together. I glued them, of course. My main complaint about these guys is the amount of preparation they needed. Although there were far less pieces to each model, every one had horrendous mould lines. They took so much filing and scraping that I obliterated the surrounding detail on more than one model. You might be able to make out all the scrapings on the photo below.


Another downside of using the MaCragge figures is that they all have a similar pose. My solution to this problem is to add extras from my bitsbox to differentiate each model, and to spread the models out over several different squads. I know I will need to purchase some more models to round out both squads anyway (veteran sergeant, special and heavy weapon) so I may take the opportunity to actually build three squads.

In any case I plan to build all the squads first before I start to paint them, so I'll let you know how I get on with Tactical squad two tomorrow.