Bad luck and garbage bins

Before we begin, another entry to the Miniature Galleries has been added, this time featuring the Wolfen of Yllia, plus I went back and edited some of the previously posted armies. Progress has been slower than what I hoped for because life got a bit chaotic lately, but I'll keep on truckin'!

Back in September in my "Lucky finds and bargain bins" post I touched on a couple of instances in my Confrontation collecting journey which I found inspiring and worthy of sharing. Truth be told, most of my collection is bound to end up on the blog, but these little vignettes are definitely some of the moments which made the journey thrilling. I think I'm lucky enough to say that most of my Confrontation acquisitions have been positive experiences. Sure, I broke some serious bank on several occasions, a mistake I'll definitely make again, but it's still a good hobby investment when you consider factors like the game's age and the inevitable scarcity of NIB product, its sheer rarity and rise of value as a result. 

What I'm trying to say is that this is a hobby after all and as such it is a luxury. True collectors need to be ready to break the bank on occasion, especially when that special rare piece pops up out of nowhere and you just pull the trigger regardless of a potentially outrageous price. In all honesty, I'm currently in such a mood, since I found a truly rare piece hidden in one corner of the internet, but it is three times the amount of what models of that size go for... but that's another story, hopefully.

However, on certain other occasions, contrary to that previous blog post, are those times when you've pulled the trigger and are just out of luck, or you hit a certain collecting frustration that you end up making some mistakes. And in those moments, the luxury feels like a nuisance. So with all that said, this is what this post will be about, thus I welcome you to my shit show.

This is probably a bit too dramatic, as I've never been burned too much. It's more that I've brought myself into situations where I just ended up scratching my head and wondering what the hell I was thinking. One such situation stems from the string of successful local purchases. As you've seen in my first collection post, a series of various blisters, boxes, and card packs randomly popped up on my radar locally, all of which I ended up buying. This kind of became a thing, to the point where I'd see some Confrontation locally and I'd just buy it without question. Which has been fine, up to a point when it wasn't. 

On that occasion, the first of my blunders, I saw an ad for a Dirz Neuromancer for some fraction of a blister price and it seemed to be in order. Listed as "unused", the one photo posted in the ad showed the see-through side of the blister, the miniature definitely seemed unused and the stamp said it was the English version. So far so good. Not so good when it arrived though! The blister was clearly open before, since the sword was already glued to the mini and there was some tiny amount of glue residue elsewhere, the card was missing, and the biggest insult of all was the included round base... Long story short, the seller was kind enough to just return the money back to me and actually let me keep the miniature, as he made it kind of obvious that he doesn't need it back, so I guess a curse also came in the blister but he decided not to disclose this information. Regardless, this hasn't been so damaging since I got my money back but the whole ordeal just made me feel bad.

The longer you stare...

...the more painful it gets.

Didn't learn from the bad experience though! Next time a Confrontation auction popped up I slapped that BID button faster than you could blink... Just thinking about it makes my eye twitch a little. It was this second hand lot of used miniatures featuring some Sessairs and a bit of Cadwallon. Eventually I got it after a small bidding war, so I cashed out some 30 euros for Kelen, Guardians of the Moor, Kelian Durak and the Cadwallon Militia. Which doesn't sound too terrible, but some pieces of the Militia were missing, the bases were terribly treated by the previous owner, there were no cards, and some of the minis had some bent weapons and/or truly bad paint slapped on them... not to mention poor Kelian Durak being so badly set on the base that his weapon had to be bent in order to fit. This auction definitely deflated my spirits at the time and it made me become more aware and hesitant about second hand lots. Maybe it's just me being spoiled by good luck with NIB products previously, but used miniatures really need to be either something truly special, at a very low price per model, or in nigh pristine condition to get me excited. And I definitely learned from this experience, though luckily that specific lesson cost me cheaply.

Send help...

Other times, there are factors which are seemingly out of your control. A while back I stumbled upon a decent stash of items on eBay from a seller in the UK and I ended up winning a few blisters. Since the seller had a bunch of stuff I wrote to them and asked if they have things that have yet to be listed, because chances are that I'd be interested and can offer a reasonable price for any potential items. They said "no". Items arrive some weeks later and then boom, the person puts some more listings up. Bit frustrating, but still interesting, so I bid again, win again, ask again, get a "no" again. Items arrive, they list stuff again. Obviously, they don't owe me anything, nor am I feeling entitled to anything, but this just felt like I'm being strung around to no obvious benefit to either of us... the items I won on the second auction I got at a lower price than what I would offer the seller have they said that they have stuff in their backlog, so the seller lost money, and I had to pay shipping and import taxes, again, so I lost money. Either way, I stopped looking at that particular seller after that second purchase, even though they kept listing stuff. Could be that they were periodically plundering their stash, but still I think this is bad practice for both parties involved and sometimes it is just wiser to step away.

Another "out of my control" situation happened last summer when I purchased quite a hefty used second hand lot of miniatures. I won't cover this story too much here since it is currently sitting in my drafts waiting to be published as one of my Collection Update posts, but that one I list as a "bad" experience since the minis were poorly packaged and various pieces came broken. I don't blame the seller, because they did what they could, but it is one of those situations where you simply have to accept that things can't always go according to plan. I'll take the punches and, if nothing else, it'll be a cool process to salvage that army. But more on that in another post. 

One more "interesting" adventure happened when I stumbled upon a fairly obscure website which had a lot of Rackham product listed. I got in touch with the store and of course it turned out that most of the product was out of stock. For some of the items which they did supposedly have there were some weird communication failures coming from the store, so in the end I backed out of the purchase. Fairly strange encounter, but I guess the depths of the internet hold many a thing best left untouched.

And I guess that's it for my bad experiences. Quite unimpressive, I'll admit. But looking back at collecting Confrontation thus far, as well as collecting many other things in other hobbies, I haven't had any major blunders, nor have I lost lots of money due to poor choices, though I'm not entirely sure why that is. Truth be told, as I've mentioned before, Confrontation is in a very healthy and safe spot. There's a lot of product circulating in a relatively small community, so the chance of a scam is at a minimum. In most cases you don't have to venture far and wide to find models, as even being on the outskirts of the community you are bound to find what you're looking for eventually. I feel like one of the big benefits when collecting Rackham games is that the company is dead and people often decide to give up and sell their collections simply because they aren't playing or interacting with it anymore. And also when you think about it, in the grand scheme of things the years when Rackham was active aren't that far away in the past and there are much older games and products which are still circulating today.

The market is alive, is all I'm saying. And if you do end up being burned a few times, chin up and wise up, because the hunt goes ever on and on.

Kelian Durak preventing me from making further mistakes...

One package flew into the cuckoo's nest

I've been working on a few longer "think piece" posts lately, so while I've been bouncing between some research and contemplation for those I've decided to write a more casual collection update in the meantime. This is also done in the hopes of guilt tripping myself into getting Confrontation back to the painting table via a visual reality check of how many unopened miniatures are still held hostage in my closet. Spoiler alert, it is a lot. But at least, as a result, there will be a lot of content on here, so hopefully you enjoy reading about it all.

Hello eBay, my old friend...

Photo dump coming in, so you know the drill, click "read more" below to see the full post!

Climbing the Monolith (MB:Isfet unboxing)

'twas a rainy day yesterday, pretty gloomy and grim in my part of Scandinavia, but made all the more enjoyable via the simple act of the local courier dropping off 15kg of Monolith goodness on my doorstep. Yes, the long awaited package from the Mythic Battles: Isfet Kickstarter campaign has finally arrived. 

Before I get into the actual meat and potatoes of the post, I'd just like to briefly point out that two more factions have been added to the Miniature Galleries section, namely the Ophidian Alliance and the Devourers of Vile-Tis. It's a bit of a slow process, mostly since Blogger is a bit clunky when it comes to formatting (this post especially was a nightmare to edit!), there's a lot of back and forth in order to make everything perfect and my OCD definitely isn't helping. However, I'm truly enjoying the process, because I am using this chance to get a better understanding of some of the models which I might have overlooked previously, plus not to mention expanding my own knowledge about some of the trivia of certain profiles. I tried adding a bit of extra information on some entries, but I'm still trying to decide what it is that these galleries are supposed to contain, just data regarding the actual models or also some info about the cards as well. Regardless, it's loads of fun and, again, if you've got any kind of feedback then I'll gladly hear you out.

But now, let us get into the review/unboxing! I've used a post break here since this one is long and heavy on images, so unless you actually clicked on the post and are seeing the whole thing, please click "read more" below.

The sands of time cannot be stopped...

Under The Mountain is dead! Long live Under The Mountain!

A blog of legendary status throughout many years into the past, it seems that it has almost completely ceased to exist recently. For whatever reason, some months ago the whole section hosting the Confrontation model images has disappeared from the blog. I initially thought that maybe this was due to Monolith acquiring Rackham rights and the establishment of the new Rackham Games and that perhaps the UtM owner was simply afraid of any potential legal action by the new owners. When you think about it, this wouldn't make sense due to Fair Use rights, since UtM made no profit off of the images, nor claimed them as their own. In any case, a few weeks ago I revisited the site and now it seems that all of the content from it has been removed and only an empty page greets you when you visit the blog. 

Regardless of the reason, this is a severe loss to the Confrontation resource pool since it preserved a lot of precious information from the game's heyday. I've spent countless hours browsing through it and it has singlehandedly kept my interest in Rackham creations strong in the years before I got personally invested in Confrontation. It was always such a simple pleasure to browse through all the model images hosted there. 

Of course, everything is still accessible via the Wayback Machine, but it is definitely not an optimal solution and you never know when that might get scrubbed away as well. But as Christopher Paolini writes, "...years pass whether we will them or not… but we can remember," and remember we will.  And not only that, but we should continue the legacy established by our predecessors. 

With this in mind, I want to use my blog and continue carrying the torch of usefulness for the community. And since UtM was, among many other things, most famous for hosting images of all of the Confrontation models, this is where I will also start. This has been something that I've wanted to do for a long while and now is finally the time.

On the right side pane you will find links to Model Galleries of specific factions. For now it only features the three Elven factions (Akkyshan, Cynwäll, Daïkinee), but I will make an effort to periodically add more to it. The miniature entries have a recognizable format previously established by UtM, but I've so far tried to fill in some gaps with additional information from other resources where possible. 

This will be a continual work in progress and in some way I would like this to be a community endeavor. If you spot that any information is wrong, or there is something crucial that I've missed adding, or you have a suggestion on how to further expand the entries, please feel free to get in touch. I am in no way anywhere close to being a Rackham scholar and historian, as some members of the community certainly are, so it would be great to get some feedback in order to make all of this useful for other people, especially those new to the hobby.

As always, thanks for reading and I hope you stick around!

Lucky finds and bargain bins

EDIT: I wrote this post at the beginning of September, but got lazy with taking photos and uploading them, thus the delay in publishing.

Some days ago there was a brief discussion on the 7 Hills discord server about lucky finds and good deals, so it kind of inspired me to share some of my loot highlights.

I've already mentioned during that discussion that my greatest bargain deal was definitely a 1 euro copy of the Dogs of War book which I snagged from an Ebay auction. Obviously I was the only bidder, which somewhat made me think that I misread the ad and that it is either a fake ad or the book was a DIY printed copy, but for such a low price I was willing to gamble. Turned out to be the real deal in the end. This one was closely followed by a still-shrink-wrapped Cadwallon RPG book for 10 euros, along with a GM Screen for free, found in a local used bookstore.

These books are worth picking up for the design and the art alone...

Moving on, back when I was making some initial purchases for my Sessairs as part of the painting challenge last year, I purchased both Sons of Ogmios models, separately priced as single models, 8 euros each. Little did I know that these were not single models, but each 8 euro "blister" was actually one of those boxes containing two blisters, as seen on the image below.  That was quite an unexpected surprise! As far as I've noticed online, these boxes don't appear in circulation that often anymore, which is quite a shame since the artwork on them is gorgeous, and it definitely makes this find all that more special. The art on the boxes is such a classic Confrontation piece and I've been lucky enough to get the third art panel in some other purchased lot where the person just randomly threw in the box as part of the overall packaging. I'll drop a few images here, but the one with all three panels will be posted all the way at the bottom!

The next one I always considered a "must have". Ever since I got into Confrontation I knew I needed to have some Wolfen in my collection and the Predators of Blood seemed like a staple. I remember that I kept eyeing some Ebay listings which were decently priced, but months passed by quickly and all those ended up being sold before I decided to pull the trigger... and when my budget was finally ready to buy a box the available prices seemed to have jumped significantly or the offered boxes weren't the English version. It kinda made me sad for bumming out on those previous deals, but I just kept occasionally checking Ebay and doing random Google searches. Well, on one such bored Google search a hit appeared for a NIB box in English, just the way I like it, for the hefty price of 20 euros, which I liked even more. The bigger surprise was the fact that the item was located in a semi-local store. The store was well known to me and at the time I knew that they had some small amount of Confrontation stock which I already plundered, but out of nowhere the PoB box appeared. I thought it was a mistake, but I ordered anyway, half expecting them to cancel the order due to it actually being out of stock. But surprise surprise, the box arrived, safe and sound and still in shrink!

The auction mystery bag...

Aside from Ebay I tend to check other second hand websites from time to time, like the French leboncoin. There was one particular auction which featured several blisters of metal miniatures from Reaper and a few from Rackham, namely unopened English blisters for the Goblin Fire Support and Syth Mornis, plus one ziplock bag with a few small metal minis and cards, pictured above. The little baggy was what piqued my interest. The auction image showed that the card in the bag was turned to the back where the Rackham logo was, so you couldn't instantly tell which blister it was supposed to be. However, zooming in on the semi-bad quality photo showed that the minis were Cynwall Akhamials. I think I haven't seen English Akhamials... probably ever out in the wild, so this made my heart skip a beat, but I couldn't tell if they were in fact English since the card was flipped, or it was the more common French variant. The other two Rackham blisters were in fact in the English language, so it made me hopeful. However, to my great frustration, the seller also decided to not respond to questions, which did raise some red flags. In the end, I decided to bite the bullet and enter a luckily short bidding war, coming out on top at around 30 euros, if I remember well. Some weeks of anxiety and shipping and the box arrived, so I instantly dived in straight onto that one single zip-lock baggy, only to reveal... the English card version! If any purchase ever epitomized the meaning of "the thrill of the hunt" this was absolutely it!

Who dares, wins!

I'll share one more short story and it's by far one that somehow struck me the most. Not much of a story actually, but more of a fact that I've randomly found an English NIB Daikinee Dream Warrior just laying around online. One of the rarer scarab models, it was just sitting there for 15 euros. It seemed so surreal, since previously I never saw it available, as it is one of those models that were basically released to be rare, and I thought that it will be a miniature which will forever elude me. Yet there it was, a literal dream come true without much sweat or sacrifice. 

Don't let your dreams be dreams...

These little stories are definitely not all of the great bargains which I landed, just some which I found amusing to share. Nor are they anything over-the-top crazy like other people shared previously online where they'd land truly insane amounts of models for pennies or less. All of these stories here are just to tell you that good deals truly are out there, still available after all these years. I believe that at least 90% of the Rackham catalog is out there somewhere waiting to resurface, but you just need to be patient and vigilant. Not to mention that Confrontation still maintains its normalcy when it comes to pricing. For the most part the community tries to maintain fair prices and even the odd sales outside the community are priced fairly overall, even the rare models don't even come close to the price pumping that some other games tend to do on the second hand market. It's just that we've been spoiled by the speed and availability of most mundane things today, we always want the thing we want asap, preferably yesterday. But the old cliche is true, good things take time.