Collection round-up - January 2026

So far in 2026 not a lot of writing has been posted here, mostly cause I've been busy with other things. Painting some Griffins for Hybrid, though right now a bit stuck in the process of basing them, organizing boardgame miniature painting sessions with a group of friends, whom I hope to introduce to Confrontation as soon as I see that they are properly hooked, and some more work done on the miniature galleries. This time around I've completed Concord, Dirz, TNB Dwarves and Elementals, so technically not a lot left until the finish line! I have also been writing one longer think piece article which I'll post soon enough, but until then here's a quick low effort collection round-up post.

Card packs! I've said it before and I'll say it again, card packs are one of my favorite supplementary Rackham things to get. Dripping with lore, atmosphere, and just the overall wonder of Aarklash, opening and browsing through a pack of cards is a beautiful ritual. Especially packs like the Travels or the The Vessel of the Winds campaign which weave a broader picture of the world and its happenings. Wonderful all around! So far I've acquired around 20 packs in total and it surprises me how many more I am yet to get... very exciting!

As far as blisters go, I was a bit all over the place this month, with nothing too fancy or rare to show off, but still attention worthy. The primary focus this year is going to be Hybrid, so I'm happy to expand my army rosters with Phidias, Thallions, and the version of Centurus which I've been missing. I am just a huge fan of the design for the members of the Lodge of Hod, since their aesthetics remind me of "Brotherhood of the Wolf", one of my favorite movies. And perhaps you remember, a chance encounter with the Centurus kicked off my raving addiction for Rackham a few years ago, so these clones have a special place in my heart. 

I'm also glad to be getting closer to having a complete collection of Behemoth orcs with those two Tracker blisters. I have a few more Behemoth things on the way, but I already see that the Behemoth Troll will be the hardest one to find as the final missing piece.

Syriak is also one of those Wolfen models which I always wanted to have, mostly because, somewhat typically, I like Red Oaks. The Drune Minotaur is a rather silly specimen in the world of amazing cow-related models of Aarklash, but still wonderful. Acquiring some of Drunes in the previous months made me slowly realize how much I like them, so I'm very pleased with the addition of the Minotaur, especially since he eluded me a couple of times in the past.

Next to all of those models the Kestrels and the Air Elemental were just additional small pickups which were stupidly cheap, each of them only a few euros. I already own one Air Elemental, which I painted during Sweet's painting challenge, but it's such a beautiful and unique sculpt that I didn't mind investing in one more piece.

And that's a wrap. As I said, a modest lot to kick the year off, but all packages full of Rackham goodness are welcome in this house! Thanks for reading, see you again soon!

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!