MrFilthyIke said:
These
Archfiends previews look pretty darn good.
Yes, those dont look bad at all, though I'm curious as to what their availability is going to be. Do I have to purchase 72 boxes of something to get the Orcus?
And to add to my statement earlier; they are not *all* bad, there are a few monsters in the very first set and a few more in the Dragoneye set that aren't bad, though mostly in monster-types. However, the good ones are almost invariably the harder (or near impossible) ones to get; I'd rather paint up my own Owl Bear than spend tons of cash trying to get one randomly or by paying through the nose for one. The other clix manufacturers (like MK, Heroclix, etc) seem to do a much better job on their monster-types also.
I picked up a few of the D&D plastic iconic characters (Nebin, Ember, a few others) with a lot of clix and minis that I recently got on ebay. They were quite small in comparison with the scale of the majority of miniatures on the market nowadays, their sculpt detail was poor at best, and at most they had 3 or 4 base colors badly splayed onto the plastic with no attempts at detailing. I was thinking about repainting them and basing them better but they are almost too small with too little detail to survive the effort. Counted as part of the package deal I got, I paid maybe 20 cents for them each, and I felt robbed a little at that
I know these are plastic and supposed to be cheap, but I can pick up MK minis that are *much* better done from ebay or several internet sites like pjcc, get what I want, and pay pennies on the dollar for them compared to buying the random packs.
Hopefully the newer sets are getting better (they seem to be from the web pics) but they certainly cant get much worse than their first run. You'd almost be better off printing out your own artwork from the 'net and making shrinky-dinks out of 'em.
Of course, they are perfectly fine for most folks, and I'm not slamming anyone who loves them, but I like to put nice looking minis down on the table when I can and those aren't it. Hopefully they will sell enough of them in the future so that the more rare, half-nice ones will be affordable in the after market.
What I'm afraid of in the SW minis is that they will use the similar sculpting/casting/painting methods of the Avalon Hill board games (Queen's Gambit and Epic Duels) plastic mini pieces. While not too bad, they were a lot cheaper than a miniatures game will be. Of course, when that is all you can get it's not that bad either
