I play quite regularly with a small gaming group and we often rotate armies for the sake of variety (and also to give us a break from the arms race that is the magic phase when undead play). This week my wood elves got a day out and I thought I would do the first post on them to show them I was pleased with their performance (although to be fair I should be thanking the animosity rule and GW dice, see here to see why 29% of the tests should roll a 1 - Craig actually rolled more like 50% but that's just him).
My wood elves are around 13 years old, it was the first army I started collecting when I got back into the hobby seriously again, when I started working for GW at Uni.
Wood Elves were just being released for 4th edition (with 5th edition only weeks away) and I have just learnt the wonders of the black undercoat from the store painters at GW (although with the new foundations and washes I am wondering about challenging this wisdom now).
First thing I picked up was a basic plastic unit of archers. These chaps have had their bonus rules for bows changed every edition since I've used them, but they are consistently worth taking.Jade was a strange colour for a unit of elves who cab 'blend' into the woods, especially with their red bows, but its not a bad colour scheme overall I guess. I can't remember the other colours but this is the age of the hexagonal white plastic pots so half the colours don't exist now anyway.
Having the base for an archer unit, I looked around for a command unit. At the time the wood elf range wasn't all that big and I decided to get every single model I could. Starting with a classic 3rd Edition command unit from Skarloc's wood elf archers no less! My command unit consists of Skarloc himself, a mage (who was sold as a standard bearer by this time) and a musician.Skarloc often had the hail of doom arrow as in the good old 4th and 5th edition champions could have magic items!
This didn't give me anough elves so I started adding the new metal archers to the unit for numbers. I quite liked these models at the time, its sad to see how poor they are (both model and painting!) compared to the recent plastics and my own efforts. As I intended to use Skarloc's standard bearer as a mage, I picked up another standard here and added a natty sticky GW banner (it seemed a good idea at the time...)These chaps seem to have sustained some battle damage over the years. When I come to adding a few more archers to this unit I'll tidy them up.
The last elf in the unit of note is the plastic Talisman elf I acquired (working in GW had its perks). In my attempt to get every wood elf in existence into my collection this rather nice plastic had to be included. His green metallic sword started a rather naff convention in my army whereby the champions could be identified by these glowy swords as other archers occasionally had pointy things too. Of course this meant I had 2 in this unit, but that was fine as Skarloc sometimes moonlighted as a hero.So here's the unit in all its battlefield glory. Rarely used in such numbers any longer - indeed they rarely go above 10 or get anything other than a musician!
My plans for this unit now is to add a few more to them and add enough command to split it into 2 units. I have the really nice new plastic wood elves I've barely touched and I also have 10 of the absolutely ancient Warhammer Fantasy Regiment archers. I like to try and get a plastic core regiment figure from each release into an army if I can (my skaven and undead have similar family trees) so its fitting my original wood elf unit should follow this theme.
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