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.