Crôn giveth! Crôn taketh!

Hail Crôn! For he has certainly provided us a miraculous spectacle this holiday season! Praise be!

Suffice to say that the server probably never saw, nor will it ever see again, such an influx of painted Crôn miniatures, nor has the internet witnessed such a rapid disappearance of available models. The market will never recover, nor will the people involved. A truly historical moment and, as a proud Sessair supporter, I am glad I was a part of the madness.

While I do honestly believe that all the painted Crôns were amazing and that all people who participated were winners, only a selected few were deemed worthy of a prize by an unknown selection of judges. Thus, here they are in all their glory.

Painted by Shades.

Painted by boyzie2000uk.

Painted by PhillipKaltenstein.

Congrats to all the winners!

My personal favorite was actually the work done by Shades, since I love how clean and crisp it is done, not to mention the lovely choice of gold for the axe. Truly amazing to look at!

As far as my Crôn goes, I mentioned it briefly on the server, I went a bit overboard. Not so much with Crôn himself, but the included diorama which I built for him along the way and that part alone was a whole project in and of itself. But first, a glimpse at the Undefeated!

If you want to see a bunch of photos I took of the diorama click "read more" below, since I dumped a lot of them and it would be a huge post for the main page.

Hobby Challenge: Rackham 2026 Bingo!

Now that the "Crôn-mas Miracle" painting competition came to an end, more on that probably in the next post, it is time to engage in a new painting endeavor. Brace yourselves, the bingo is coming!

A little clarification is in order. At some point during the early days of 2025 I started having an idea about hosting a painting competition of some kind on the 7 Hills discord server, as it seemed like a fun little community project and I could use the blog to host images of the entries and maybe get some of my non-Discord readers to join as well.

However, by the end of summer and just around the time when Shino's painting competition ended, it became clear that not a lot of people on the server enjoy engaging in painting "competitions" per se. It could be due to lack of time for hobbying, it could be the competition aspect, could be lack of motivation, could be all sorts of things. The same thing was also observable during the painting challenge hosted by Sweet in 2024. Either way, it got me thinking about trying to do something less competitive, but also requiring less effort from the participants while still somewhat motivating people to get things done.

Enter the bingo! I saw this idea back in 2017 over at The Rob Hawkins Hobby Blog and I've always wanted to give it a try. Basically, it is like one of those bingo cards, but instead of numbers you have tasks which you can complete over the course of one whole year. You do a task, you cross it off of the card. I think it's a very nice tool to have that can generate ideas for the times when you're stuck regarding what to paint next or as a general source of inspiration to start hobbying. I imagine that it can also be quite satisfying to cross off the boxes once you're done and that this in itself can be a way to get motivated.

Below you will find the tasks I came up with for our very own Rackham bingo and some basic rules!

The 3 golden rules of bingo:

1. A model/terrain/accessory/whatever can only count for 1 square (for example, you can't paint Aerth, Prelate-General and count him for both the "mounted model" and the "character" squares)
2. You get 5 blank spaces (a "blank space" means that you can create your own task and use it to replace one of the tasks that I created) 
3. Deadline is 31.12.2026.

I added the "blank spaces" rule primarily because the bottom row of the bingo is pretty niche and I understand that not everyone wants to do those. There have been some people on 7 Hills mentioning that they want to start their own blogs and podcasts or any other outlet where they can express their thoughts about Rackham games, so this was a way to motivate them to do it. I'd love it if I wasn't the only one with a blog on there, it'd be nice to have a blogging buddy. Similarly, maybe you don't want to buy miniatures outside your chosen army or don't own any boardgames (non-Rackham ones) or miniatures that have been sitting in your stash for a year (wow I wrote that with a straight face). So in case you don't want to do some tasks, you are free to create up to 5 of your own and replace some that I've created.

If this generates enough attention, there will be a channel created specifically for this on 7 Hills, so we'll have a place to further motivate each other and track progress. I sincerely hope many of you will join me on this little endeavor and hopefully I won't be the only one participating! If not, thanks for reading anyway!

Collection round-up - December 2025

I was hoping that this post will start with the good old "I finished some more model galleries", but sadly that is not the case. Between the "Crôn-mas Miracle!" and other, more earthly holidays, I've been away from the keyboard quite a lot. Worry not though, this year will be full of content on here, I promise you that!

December has been absolutely wild for the collection! Where to even begin? I'll share images one by one and then post a group photo at the end, since I want to go step by step and ruminate on all the things separately, that's how much this month got me excited.

The big boy is up first. Controversial as it might be, I think it is a valuable piece of any serious Confrontation collection, if anything for the period of Rackham's history which it marked. I grabbed this one for extremely cheap, 30 euros along with the Confrontation 3 book, so it wasn't that big of a sacrifice. Personally, aside from the historical significance, I dislike the pre-painted plastics for Confrontation, mostly for what it did to the game and the company and the fact that I'm honestly not that impressed with the miniatures. The box art is gorgeous, all the gaming accessories are great, and actually the terrain piece is pretty cool, albeit a bit on the thin side which was a bit disappointing. But the Wolfen and Griffin miniatures are a huge downgrade from what we were spoiled with in metal in the previous Rackham era. People say that over time the pre-painted miniatures got better, but I honestly haven't seen that quality anywhere so far in my Rackham journey, aside from AT-43. Regardless of the negatives, happy to own this piece of history.

Speaking of pre-painted plastics and AT-43, a little second hand lot popped up locally for pennies (8 euros to be exact) and it'd be a bummer to let it slip by. I forgot to pull 'em out of storage when I was taking photos for this post and realized I missed them when I packed everything back, so you're just gonna have to trust me. Essentially, the lot consists of UNA Shock TacArms, one black Wraith Golgoth and a few Bane Goliaths in need of some glue. Main reason I bought these was because of how cheap they were listed for, but little did I know that these TacArms are supposedly rare-ish. I know absolutely nothing about various rarities and values of AT-43 things, so this nugget of wisdom was handed over to me on the 7 Hills server. Guess I got lucky!

This is where things start to get spicy. Cyclops of Mid-Nor, Predators of Blood, Apostates of Darkness, and the Drune Horned Raiders boxes came as a deal, all English and NIB for a total of 90 euros. I'd consider that a pretty good deal even for community standards. The Cyclops is quite rare, I've only ever seen one that was English/NIB and that one alone went for around 90-100 euros. Apostates by default hang around the 100 euro mark for the most part and Predators have just steadily been increasing in price for the past year, though they have been seeing a bit of a dip, at least on eBay. Only the Raiders are somewhat common and affordable, this box actually being the first dip into Drunes for me. So all in all, this was an amazing deal to snag and I'm so excited to finally add the Cyclops to my collection, as it is one of my favorite Mid-Nor models next to the Demon Tower. And I'm happy to expand my Ophidian collection with the Apostates, since Ophidians in general have been a bit of a dried up well when it comes to English editions. Predators of Blood are a duplicate box for me, thus they are already available for trading or selling on my buy-sell-trade post on the 7 Hills server, but I'm kinda debating if I should keep the box as allies for my Daikinee army. Gonna think on that for a little more.

I've also managed to grab a little weird lot of used things, namely Cynwall and Wolfen card packs (which I also forgot to photo), a big ol' stack of loose English cards and six painted Ira Tenebrae models (also forgotten). Same as the Predators above, the card packs are duplicates for me, so they will be listed for sale/trade as well. Regarding the loose cards, the stack is actually way bigger in person than how it looked like in the listing of the seller, so that was a pleasant surprise. I'd assume the previous owner was a big fan of Dirz, since it seems like the stack has almost all Dirz profile cards sans Tarascus and Sasia's Second Incarnation. I'm excited for these cards, primarily since they will be a tremendous help when buying Dirz models, since I can now simply purchase non-English blisters/boxes knowing I already have the English ones. Also especially excited for the small stack of Hybrid cards, since there are some great profiles in there. The non-Dirz cards are a bit more frustrating, because while there definitely are some full sets, some things are lacking... for example, all of Morzath's cards except the Cyclops, or all of Sulfur's cards but missing the Troll. It is what it is, it'll be nice having spares at least!

The above used card lot also included these packs from Cry Havoc magazines, I just forgot to pull 'em out for the family photo, yada yada. These will also help tracking down the magazines, since many copies out there come without the cards, or if I end up getting duplicates I'll probably make someone else happy.

Here is a small continuation of the dip into Drunes, Morgwen and the Lanyfhs crossing my path for less than 10e was a deal I didn't want to skip. Not much to say about these other than that I'm excited about finally owning and growing a Drune army. Having painted so many Sessairs it'll be a thrill to explore the darker side of the Kelts. And also Lanyfhs are amazing, screw the haters.

Yes, I bend the knee and admit defeat. Alahan got me this time around! This is one of the rare models from the Lions that I enjoy and it showed up locally for extremely cheap so I went and grabbed it. Definitely one of my least favorite factions still, but credit where credit is due and I'm pretty sure I'll find a use for it eventually.

And then last but definitely not the least, Erhyl and Irul. After so much chasing and being patient, I finally found them. Here and there Erhyl has been popping up, but Irul is the elusive one. Previously I ever saw only a few of them out in the wild, but my recaster-sense went off every time and I never pulled the trigger. 

However, this purchase required some investigative work first, which made it that much more exciting. While talking to the seller, they provided an image of the miniatures and specifically for Irul said that "Irul has no card, Rackham never printed cards" which raised an eyebrow. 

I know that a few people from the 7 Hills have Irul and I've reached out to ask if they have the card and if they could provide a photo, but none of them could. Extensive searching mojo online fielded no result for physical evidence of a card, obviously aside from the scan that is up on the wiki and many other places. Essentially, it boils down to the fact that VPC models came with promo cards only and that some of the released cards were put up on the Rackham site for people to download and print at home. Some VPC art cards do exist, like the VPC Lanyfhs, but seeing as how Irul came out in 2007 maybe something changed with the way Rackham was doing things by then. Until someone, anyone, can show me a physical Irul card I will believe that it simply does not exist. Ironically, his card is one of my visually favorite cards ever made for Confrontation.

There's also a bit of a story behind this purchase once I actually paid for it. I was contemplating a long time if I should pull the trigger on this deal, because it was a bit expensive, yet completely justified, so when I finally did I breathed out a sigh of relief. It was happening! Sadly, this was just before the holidays, so shipping was bound to be slower. I received a tracking number and I was checking it fervently almost every day while it made its trip through France and toward Scandinavia. All was well, until it wasn't! On the French La Poste the tracking showed that the package was delivered to a pickup point in Sweden, but when I checked the Swedish tracking website, the package didn't exist at all. A bunch of visits and calls proved fruitless since nobody knew where the package was or that it even arrived or that it even existed. Luckily during one of the calls to the Swedish postal service, in which I was somewhere around 140th in the queue I shit you not, I get told that tracking numbers from one country don't necessarily work in other countries and that there exists this "international tracking number" which you need to provide in that case in order to locate a parcel. Long story short, lots of stress, but I finally picked it up literally an hour before they'd return it back to France! Lesson learned for the future, don't order important things at the end of the year and ask for international tracking just in case.

I am microscopically sad that Erhyl is in French, but what that is saying to my collector brain is that it only leaves space to track down an English version too! In any case, this marks a gigantic step for my Daikinee collection, about which I'll talk more about soon.

And that's it! Hope you enjoyed the read and stay tuned, because in a few days I have a fun little post in the pipeline!

Reflections and goals at the end of 2025

Months go by and the wheel keeps turning, the yearly cycle coming to an end. I'm not one to celebrate the end of the year much, but this time of the year does always bring me into a contemplative mood. A good time to reflect and think about the plans ahead.

When it comes to hobbies, 2025 has been a good year all around. Collecting, painting, writing, reading, somehow I managed to do it all this year. Well, everything except playing, but I like to tell myself that that one is reserved for next year. Let's break it down.

Painting has suffered a little bit, I managed to paint only 22 miniatures, out of which 14 were Confrontation sculpts, almost half of what I painted in 2024. This was mostly due to two factors. First and foremost, painting challenges. In 2024 I was part of one escalation painting league and one painting competition, which I talked about in this post, the one organized by Sweet. This year I only took part in the challenge organized by Shino, covered in this post, and the current ongoing Crôn-mas Miracle competition. All of this is to say that I think events like these bring out the best of me when it comes to spending time at the painting table. I find those challenges extremely motivating and I always try to go the extra mile, using almost every free minute of the day to hold the brush. 

Without challenges and competitions I find it very easy to slip into other hobbies or some other less productive forms of procrastination. One of the positives was that I spent a lot of that time writing here and, to be honest, I enjoyed this journey a lot. And what I liked even more about it was sharing it with the community. End of September with the "Lucky finds..." and October with the "Climbing the Monolith" posts were an extremely motivating time, since those posts generated the most views and feedback from the readers. I hope that I contribute at least a small part to our hobby space and seeing some of my articles getting lots of clicks is humbling and inspirational.

That said, I like that I increased the monthly publishing count in the last quarter of the year and it is definitely something I hope to keep doing in the future. A considerable effort has been put into planning out schedules for posts and pondering about the things I want to write about down the line, so hopefully this space can continue being valuable and entertaining to all of you. 

Overall, I think 2025 has been a tremendous year for the blog, definitely surpassing my own expectations and hitting some important milestones. I think it provided me with much needed focus and space to clear my mind and to realize which hobbies are important to me. I've mentioned before, I'm all over the place and have many things I collect and ruminate over, but this blog and the community made me understand just how important Aarklash is to me, how deep I want to delve into it further, and how I only barely scratched the surface. It will definitely put a lot of other hobbies into the back seat and some I might drop entirely for the sake of Rackham's worlds.

Speaking of other hobbies, another factor which contributed to painting less is time spent writing elsewhere and just being away from home a lot. I've been traveling back to Serbia quite often this year and every time that I do I run an RPG campaign back in my hometown which takes a lot of preparation, which is enjoyable nonetheless! I have another blog where I sometimes post about RPGs which is currently on an extended break, but I hope to lively up that place soon-ish, at least in order to mention the campaign I'm running, so I'll definitely advertise it here for all those interested once that happens.

All of this is to say that I need more structure to organize my painting time when competitions, challenges, or leagues are not happening. My Confrontation collection keeps growing rapidly and I dislike seeing it just sit there, regardless of calling it a pile of "shame" or "potential". The collection has easily quadrupled since the blog started and I don't think the purchasing sprees are gonna slow down any time soon, so the brush truly needs to see more use.

So, what are my goals moving forward and for 2026 specifically?

• Try to achieve, or hopefully surpass, my painted miniature count of 2024 - this means have at least 40 miniatures painted by the end of 2026, with at least half being miniatures released by Rackham;
• Figure out a good painting regiment in order to achieve this - aka stay motivated to paint even when no "events" are being held;
• Keep my focus on Rackham - reorganize all my other hobbies and stay focused on Rackham games primarily;
• Get some games going - my aim is to get Hybrid on the table first and make that a semi-regular activity, then slowly transition over to Confrontation;
• Write, write, write - ideally, I would love to keep posting here once every week, or once every other week, if I could keep up that pace for the entire year I will be quite happy;

I have a lot of other plans and wishes for the time ahead, but I want to keep these goals strict and achievable. All the signs point to 2026 being another great year and I'm looking forward to sharing that journey with you all. A huge thank you to everyone reading the blog and taking any kind of interest in my thoughts on here, the support and attention means the world. Hope you all had a great year and that the time ahead of us will treat you even better. See you soon!

Survival guide for the rabid collector

One of my previous posts about the moments when collecting made me sad and frustrated truly got me thinking. I've read numerous bad experiences from other collectors, not just among those who collect Confrontation mind you, and many of those make my lows completely pale in comparison. There are horror stories out there and I'm glad that I've managed to evade them in a rather wide swing.

But it did get me thinking regarding why that is. I don't consider myself all that lucky, persistent and patient more than anything else, and I'm also not one to toot my own horn above anyone else's misery and imply that they were careless and dumb and I was not. But I guess there simply is something that I'm doing that's reaping me rewards or at least making me not lose sleep over bad shopping decisions.

Contemplating all this got me behind the keyboard again, so here we are. Before delving deeper though, Drunes and Acheron galleries are done now as well!

I've mentioned a couple of times before, I honestly think that the Confrontation market is pretty stable and healthy, a fact which warrants to be repeated. When you consider for how long the game has been dead, it is surprising to find a lot of product circulating around at decent prices. Sure, you get some crazy spikes for some models or just clueless sellers on eBay trying to rip you a new one, but for the most part the community is keeping it normal.

As time goes on and product truly becomes scarce, some models do stop appearing so often, thus you either have to arm yourself with some extra patience or you have to bend the knee and go outside of the community for your purchases. Most people don't have the patience since life moves fast nowadays, so going out into the wild in search for loot is where accidents happen. 

It's worth noting that I've been collecting various things ever since I was a kid... Card games, RPG books, board games, the list is long and one might say that I have a problem, but all those hobbies have more failed stories than what I wrote about before. I lost money many a time, though never spectacularly since I've always been careful with spending, but all those failures gradually accumulated some worthy experience for evading monetary disaster.

Without further ado, here's the survival guide for the rabid collector, or simply how to be safe when venturing outside of the community safety and stepping into the world of various obscure online stores and websites.

Spend some time and do research. I think I spend a considerable amount of my time browsing the market, keeping tabs on past sales, active auctions, current offers, and then you kind of get a good sense of health when it comes to the state of the market. This is especially important if you are new to Confrontation and you learn what is rare and what is common. Similarly, the below image is a good guideline of the prices within the community, but venturing outside warrants some price increases unless you're lucky and the seller is generous. However, as I said, knowing the market and its past, you'll get a sense of what is rare and what is justified to be more expensive than what the list says.

On a similar note, and probably the most important piece of advice, stay calm. Rare things are out there. Rare things that are cheap are also out there. But often times if you see a rare thing for a low price, to the point where it seems too good... that's when you need to be careful. It's easy to be trigger happy, but it's also easy just to take a breath and think about it: either you're lucky and the item is just sitting there waiting for you, in which case congrats, or it is there because it stinks and others saw it and walked past it leaving it for the next sucker. In order to not be the sucker, keep on reading and thank you for the continued attention.

If you're on renowned second hand market websites (such as eBay or the French Leboncoin), always prefer ads with actual photos of the item in question, not just a "stock" photo. Stock photo auctions rarely end up being NIB or legit product, but if you do stumble on such ads which tickle your interest some of the points below will be helpful to verify it. Similarly, non-stock photos could as well be taken from other places on the internet and reposted, in which case it is an obvious scam. You'd be surprised how often this happens. If you are insane like me spend a lot of time browsing the market eventually you'll end up semi-recognizing past ad photos, so you'll get your sixth sense tingling when these reused photos appear. 

Read the ad description of the listing carefully. I've had friends collecting "Oldhammer" get burned millions of times buying loose miniatures which end up being recasts, simply because they haven't read the ad description which clearly stated that they are recasts. It did also happen to me once on an auction for an RPG book which stated in its fine print that it is a print-on-demand copy. That one is on me. Just read people, please.

Engage with the seller. If you have any doubts about anything, contact them. Ask for a photo of the actual item or ask some follow-up questions regarding the description if they can't provide an image. No photo for me is usually sus, but sometimes I might cave in either if the price is low enough or the seller is good with communicating.

Similarly, if the seller doesn't sound any alarm bells in your head and you end up buying from them, always ask if they have more product and make an offer regardless. In my experience there's always a high chance that they do and they just haven't listed it yet cause they are still debating whether to sell or they are going through a backlog of items. This obviously applies to sellers you consider legit.

All that said, if you're shopping on these second hand auction websites like the aforementioned eBay or Leboncoin, you're somewhat protected as a buyer and you usually have rights to file a claim or report the seller if you feel like the seller did you over when it comes to delivery or item condition, etc. These are things worth keeping in mind cause technically you can be a bit more relaxed on those markets.

The real hazard is on random stores on the internet and unknown low traffic online shops.

Always check if the store has other items from "live" publishers, especially those that are currently considered new. By this I mean whatever is fresh in other games that are currently in print. For example, at the time of writing this the Thunder's Edge expansion for the Twilight Imperium boardgame is popping up on most active websites, or if the store sells GW product it is easy to quickly check online what is their newest release and whether the store has it. This is a good indication that the store is still operational, since a lot of the stores where Confrontation or any other older game pops up are sadly defunct and haven't been updated in ages. A good tip for easy inspection is to check the copyright stamp on the homepage of the store, you know one of those "© 2017-2025" for example. If that latter year is like 2012 then I have some sad news for you.

Additionally, go into a bit of a stalker mode and check the social media of the store. If there are no socials for the webstore, that usually ends up being a red flag. If there are, check if they have recent updates. If they do have socials, but the last update was from some years ago, this could mean that they just stopped being active on there, yet other times it might indicate that they have shut down their operations and the store is no more.

Further into the store stalker mode, you can also check the store's contact page. If there is no phone or address listed, red flag in my book. If there is a phone, good, though I don't recommend you ring up international numbers, so be weary of the store's country of origin. Phone usually isn't the deal breaker, but having a physical address scores major points. If they have an address, Google Maps Street View is your friend and many times that can help you verify the authenticity of the vendor. But, keep in mind that many smaller stores did move to being fully online during/after the great plague of 2020, so the address could just point you to their warehouse or otherwise weird looking location where it is hard to imagine a store or gaming club. In the end, it never hurts to send the store an email, if they have one listed.

If the store has a lot of rare product, chances are that it is no good. Either a dead store from back in the day, some kind of scam, or just a recaster. The latter category has some pretty notorious or famed websites, depending on who you ask, so if you want to see a list of the known ones you can find that list on the "7 Hills" discord server. Personally I dislike recasts and just don't want to give them traffic from here, so I'm not going to list them.

Last, but definitely not the least, interact with the community. Chances are that you can find someone who lives in the country or state where a particular store is located, the player map is helpful for this, and just ask them if they've heard about the store or if they've shopped there before. This can obviously save you a lot of trouble verifying all of the above yourself.

And I think that is about it. This wasn't a super exhaustive list of all the things that you can do to be 100% safe, since technically there isn't a completely foolproof method for hunting rare things. You do need some luck, but some of these tips listed above are just little things you can do to minimize going utterly unprepared. It might seem like a bit of homework, but it'll keep you happy in the long run and at some point you might even end up enjoying the whole process of investigation, like I do. It's fun looking into the bowels of the internet and seeing what pops up. 

Do you have any special tips and tricks for hunting those rare pesky minis and avoiding traps? Drop a comment, I'm always interested in new tools of the trade.

Thanks for reading and remember, patience is a virtue. Happy hunting!