Show Me What You've Got

Greetings!

Today's post is a special one. There's never been anything like it on the blog before. Ever.

What is it, then? A complete assortment of statistics about my miniature collection, of course!

Over the course of two days I took out every single box, bag and crate that I use to store miniatures, to record the number of armies and models I currently have in my entire collection. I also made a note of every miniature that I've finished out of this collection, with Painted-Percentages for the total as well as for each army individually. I compiled all this data into an Excel-sheet, from which I then created some diagrams for you to look at.

Here it is, the cold, hard truth. I currently own 1457 (yes, fourteen hundred and fifty-seven) individual miniatures. Each base holding any number of models (like the Anvil of Doom) was counted as a single miniature, although I keep my war machines and their crews separate, so a Cannon with three crew would still equal four miniatures. Simple!


These 1457 miniatures are divided into ten (10!) different armies across all four Grand Alliances. Oh yes, I forgot to mention at the beginning: these minis all for Age of Sigmar / Warhammer Fantasy Battles. No Warhammer 40k models or models for any other game like Kings of War, Rune Wars or such. The tally doesn't even take my collection of A Song of Ice and Fire miniatures into account!

Although that is a tremendous amount of miniatures to own and, indeed, to store in a student apartment, I was happy to discover that most of them had been finished already. A total of 76,53 %, in fact! What I considered finished was a good tabletop quality paintjob and any kind of base attached to the mini, textured or no. Most of the bases were in fact textured and painted already, but there are a few otherwise finished regiments that I'm just not sure about when it comes to their base theme or base shape.

Moving on to the armies!

First up, my by far the largest army and the very reason I set up this blog: my dwarves/duardin/Dispossessed. I was elated to find most of them already done, with only a couple of heroes, war machines and a regiment of Longbeards still waiting for their clan colours.

This is my favourite army above all the rest, but sadly I haven't fielded them in a long time. They're still all on squares as I find myself unable to tear apart or mutilate almost three-and-a-half hundred textured bases just to convert them to rounds. I use them in casual, friendly narrative games and campaigns, which is my favourite way of doing Age of Sigmar, anyway!

Then we have the newcomers: my Aelves! A massive dawi throng needs a bunch of cowardly elgi to fight, don't they?

I got a couple of aelven units with the Spire of Dawn (ex- Island of Blood) boxed set a year-or-so into Age of Sigmar after the End Times, and I got a massive haul of models second-hand just this summer. I've been painting them like crazy, having recently finished 40 Highborn Archers and 30 Highborn Spearmen in a multi-month Batchpaint-a-geddon!

I've mounted all my aelves of rounds, a decision which I've later come to question as most of the units were cut from the newest incarnation of aelven soldiery: the Cities of Sigmar allegiance. Luckily I can still field most of them as Darkling Covens and Order Serpentis models, but every now and then I whip out the 1st Edition Age of Sigmar High Elf rules and go to town with a casual, narrative match. The only way for me to get the twins Teclis and Tyrion into the fight!

On a related note, I have a strong suspicion that the recent announcement by Games Workshop about them bringing back Warhammer: the Old World in the next three or so years will be a hybrid ruleset of the old WFB and current AoS. I think they might produce new rules and a wide selection of movement trays, with both round and square slots available. Think about it: it would enable both WFB-square-base die-hards and round-based Ageofsigmarites to play the same game with the same rules, with ranks and flanks and all that! It would be like A Song of Ice and Fire miniatures game, as it features round bases of models who then get mounted to square trays in ranks. No need for new lines of Fantasy models, just breathing life into older ones and recycling the AoS-lines. The Song of Hammers and Eagles would cover every hobbyist, both new and old!

Oh, I digress... back to the armies, then.

My very first Warhammer army in the early years of 7th Edition WFB: the Empire/Freeguild/Cities of Simgar. All painted, all based, all tried and tested. To be honest, I'd be concerned if fourteen years of hobbying didn't get my first army done!

I still love their aesthetics, their lore and their playstyle. Like Duardin Lite, but with knights, halberds and feathered hats!

Ah, the flower of chivalry: Bretonnia. I got these in the late 8th Edition WFB, and managed to hoard enough of them to last me all these years even after they went out of print. They're all painted in the merry blue-and-yellow of Svedonnia, my Sweden-inspired version of everyone's beloved Bretonnia!

I still have a Trebuchet, some Peasants and Men-at-Arms to go, as well as a unit of Knights of the Realm. I also haven't had the courage to bring my brush to King Louen either!

To balance out all that Orderly goodness, one has to have a bunch of chaotic schemers! My Slaves to Darkness/Diciples of Tzeentch force is a healthy combination of Chaos Knights, Chaos Warriors and Marauders, with a splattering of Daemons thrown in for good measure.

The colour scheme I chose for them is time-consuming but, to my eye, absolutely quite nice. Check it out in my army gallery! The Army Showcase many also has pics of most of my other armies, might be worth checking out if you want proof that I've actually painted any of what I'm showing off here.

One of my more recent armies: the Bonesplitter Orruks! I started this force after I won their Warscroll Cards and Battletome at one of our local game store's leagues, and I've been building up the force ever since.

The army is a mixed congregation of newer plastic sculpts and older metallic ones, and I've painted all of their skin orange. Yes, orange. They look quite exotic, and I like them that way.

Heh, this one breaks the descending order of total models but hey, it's close enough to its rightful place in the list. These are the Ulgumgi, a tribe of ex-freeguild humans living in Ulgu, the Realm of Shadows, along with their Sylvaneth allies. Only a handful of model yet to be painted, but they're going to get finished in the coming year (like hopefully the rest of my collection as well).

I started this army during the 2019 Tales of Instahammer event, and got it from scratch to where-it-is-now in only six months! It's an amazing experience, you should definitely check it out: just look for Tales of Instahammer on Facebook or Instagram.

More pictures.

Stormcast Eternals! These ones I got back when Age of Sigmar launched and I wanted to have a go at the new champions of Order! After playing Empire and Dwarves through WFB and reading nothing but stories (and, sadly, battlereports) of over-powered Chaos shenanigans and of the good and just always getting their arses kicked, these super-humans felt like a fresh breeze of justice and revenge. Finally somehting to fight back with!

Powerful units, large models, high points cost = less models to paint which, for a horde-army fan like me, was a godking-send.

Steampunk Dwarven Sky-Pirates: the Kharadron Overlords. What's not to like about these guys? The sculpts are simply stunning, I've never felt such joy in painting a bunch of minis before. They're so satisfying to paint!

I plan on expanding on this force in the future, once the backlog is out of the way. They also make great reinforcement for some of my Cities of Sigmar lists.

Nighthaunt: the innocent dip-of-my-toe into the Grand Alliance of Death. I once had a hundred-or-so model army of Tomb Kings, but I didn't use them regularly enough to they got a new home. These Nighthaunt will probably remain a marginal force in my collection, used for funsies in some smaller games or skirmish campaigns. I'm not feelin' it for ghosts that much, but they do have some enjoyable lore-related game mechanics that I like.

Finally, everything else. This category includes some spare duardin Miners, lost Freeguild Militiamen, some remnants of my Wood Elf army in the form of Dryads and Wardancers, a Devoted of Sigmar skirmish warband and the models I painted for the Warhammer Quest: Shadows over Hammerhal boxed game.

Most of these are getting sold off or turned into conversion materials for my other projects, but for the sake of transparency and fairness I had to include them in the tally.

That's it for my miniature inventory, my version of the infamous Pile of Shame. It wasn't as bad as I thought, only 342 models to sell or paint until I hit the revered Zero Backlog. Considering I painted 240 models just this year, which was busy with schoolwork from the university, I think I can hit the zero during 2020.

Until next time!