How it all started

Well, it has been a hot minute since the blog's opening post, mostly since I took up way too many hobby "challenges" in 2024 (more on that soon) which ended up eating a lot of my hobby time. Nevertheless, here we are. This post might not be so thrilling for veterans, but at the same time it may be interesting for everyone to see how my collection started up. I for one definitely suffer from that voyeuristic rush of taking a peek at other people's collections and I'd imagine that many of you suffer from similar afflictions. So essentially what this post is going to be is just a photo dump of all the stuff I bought in 2023.

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"To kill, protect and serve...and get you into Confrontation!"

As I mentioned previously, my Confrontation collecting journey started off in the month of August 2023 thanks to the guy above. A peculiar bit of my own personal lore is that the first piece of Confrontation art that I saw was in fact the amazing work which Édouard Guiton and Paolo Parente did for the Dirz. Back then the game was out of my grasp and I was mostly eyeing it on the sidelines, but seeing the Centurus Clone last year I felt a sort of calling that it is finally time to get into it... on top of the fact that the blister itself was absurdly cheap.

There's no denying the fact that Dirz are a visual staple of the entire setting. If you observe them in the context of the world, the visuals of the Alchemists just ooze with eeriness and, at the same time, they completely belong in Aarklash, but also seem like a true anathema to anything remotely fantastical as a setting. They are cold and alien, but fit absolutely perfectly into the weirdness of the world. And to me that is absolutely a huge selling point. 

This initial acquisition kicked off a small streak of other Dirz purchases which made me think that I'm definitely going to end up as a primary Alchemist player. Which, you know, is good. Focus is good when collecting things, instead of spending money on ten armies all at once... right?

At the time, against all sanity, I was bidding on numerous Confrontation-related auctions for models of various factions, yet fate would have it that I only managed to snatch a box of Sentinels of Danakil and two card packs, Litanies of Darkness and Spellbook of Technomancy. 

I joked many times on Discord that I'm "cursed" to be a Dirz player, but once the curse got broken I haven't touched the Dirz since.

The Dirz curse ended up being randomly broken by none other than a Griffin Executioner, quite fitting and poetic in a way. Usually, I shy away from human-based armies in fantasy games, simply because there's always something way more interesting to play than plain old boring humans. Griffins of Akkylannia, on the other hand, are not your average plain old boring humans and are absolutely an army I would play, both for the lore and the aesthetics. Menacing, brooding, religiously unhinged and quite brutal, the grim-dark vibe in a fantasy setting definitely stood out at the time and it suits the Griffins superbly to this day. 

This was just a cheap local purchase that was too good to ignore and so up to now I haven't given the army any more attention, even though I plan to in the future. Recently I've found some local Griffins which I plan to pick up, but they have to stand in line for a little bit longer.

Soon after that I stumbled upon a small trove of various card packs which I grabbed without a moment of hesitation. I'm well aware that these are not usable in V2+ editions of the game, but I'm a sucker for cards and different accessories for miniature games in general (evidently a result of my very real obsession with various dead CCGs). The big plus when it comes to cards in Confrontation (aside of the unit cards, I mean) is that spell, item, faction, etc. cards feature so much lore and flavor. It entices you to read each and every line in order to go further down the rabbit hole of Aarklash and discover some corner of the universe which you didn't reveal before. 

Never say "no" to more cardboard...

The streak of randomness continued when a random Cynwall Equanimous Warrior dropped out of nowhere. To date this has been the cheapest miniature find, since I picked this guy up for a whooping 1 euro. That price definitely doesn't pay the sculpt justice since this is one of those weird miniatures which made Rackham designs stand out so high above the competition. Everything is wild about this mini.

"GW wish they designed me first..."

Elves suddenly abound! The next two pickups I was extremely excited about. First of all, Cynwall  Quarterstaffer which, lets be honest, are going to cosplay as Truth Warriors on the table. Last, but definitely not the least for 2023, a Daikinee Zephyr. Years ago when I was browsing the Confrontation armies, the Daikinee stood out as my army of choice. I'm generally a sucker for woodland-based fantasy faction designs, but the Rackham take on elves leaning more into the insectoid aesthetics is amazing.

Elves with paws for scale (you'll see those paws a lot on this blog)

These humble and chaotic beginnings marked the end of 2023 and, let me tell you, the collection craze definitely ramped up in 2024. I've made some big purchases this year, but those require posts of their own... and in reality I haven't even delved properly into most of said purchases, to my great shame all the acquired stuff is still laying around in shipping boxes, so this blog will make me sit down and give all those goodies some much deserved attention.

At the start of this journey in the months of last year I basically just bought things that were popping up locally. Chance encounters without much searching, they all ended up being interesting miniatures and cards which pulled me deeper and deeper into collecting. Casual adjacency to Confrontation turned into rabid scouring the internet for bits of information and the next purchase. (yeah you might call it early signs of addiction, but at least it ain't crack). Peculiarly, it showed me that all the armies in Confrontation have a special something that would make me want to pick them up and play, be it aesthetics, the lore, the strategies, or something fourth. And usually, in almost any game I play, it's rather difficult to settle and collect only ONE thing, something that I would assume a lot of us suffer from. But Confrontation pumps the difficulty of that choice up to eleven, and I'd literally want to play with all of the things it has to offer.

Well, except the Lions of Alahan. And Tir-Na-Bor Dwarves. Fuck those guys.

At the dawn of a new age...

Greetings, fellow traveler, and welcome to this small corner of the internet.

As I've never formally introduced myself on ye olde Confrontation Discord server (the first place where I'll actually reveal this blog), a little intro is in order.

Name is Stefan, but depending on the webspace you encounter me at you might hear some different nicknames. Some call me Moth, some call me Moon, other places know me as Howler, or some combination of those names. All of these are mainly because I've been stretched between numerous hobbies and communities and long time passions, those primarily being RPGs, various board and miniature games, CCGs, and hardcore punk (and generally underground DIY) music... In real life, you will mainly encounter me in Sweden or to a lesser extent in Serbia, the place where I spent most of my years originally.

When it comes to Confrontation, during the years when Rackham was active I was a humble student with rather shallow pockets (and already committed to several of the aforementioned hobbies which I barely maintained at the time), so I was mostly observing the game from the sidelines and had only a handful of demo games under my belt with borrowed community miniatures. The scene in my home town was relatively small (some 10-15 people), but quite active at times since I remember gatherings and tournaments happening regularly. But for me personally, there was always something special about Confrontation that got stuck in my head and it made me think about it for years on end, many times feeling the pull to start collecting.

Two decades later and now living in a new country, I nose-dived right into Confrontation in 2023 when I locally stumbled upon a cheap NIB Centurus Clone blister at random. Something simply clicked in me that it was finally time and I just let myself be consumed.

So what is the point of this blog? Not sure to be honest. I am rather impulsive when it comes to creating blogs, since I always have a strong urge to document my thoughts and feelings, primarily due to my love for writing, yet another passion. The actual process of writing anything puts me in a specific kind of headspace where I have to step back and truly reflect on a particular subject, exploring all the emotions and in fact properly appreciating the thing in question, preserving the moment for some future point in time. 

But being less poetic, I am hoping to simply record my journey through Confrontation and document the growth of my collection (which happens all too often) and my knowledge of the game and its universe. I'd also like this place to be a good repository for useful resources for other beginners. There are some other, grander plans that I would like to achieve here and provide something useful and entertaining to the wonderful community built around this game, but for that both you and I need to be patient. Time will tell if I succeed or not.

Thank you for reading, hope you follow along!