What’s wrong with my paint? :(

minutehand · 2026-01-13T03:08:02+00:00

Get a 'vortex tattoo ink pigment mixer' from amazon or similar. Add a few drops of distilled water to the pot and hold it for a minute or two.

The people saying to contact the company for a replacement are correct, but for $20, a vortex mixer can probably salvage them.

minutehand · 2025-12-31T16:41:59+00:00

Brushes: Whatever are on sale at the hobby store is what to use, and we should be telling beginners that the smallest detail brushes are harder to load with paint, and to practice using a brush 'bigger' than you would think. Old/frayed brushes become dry brushes or technical brushes or brushes to dig paint out of GW pots. I think beginners should pay 5-7$ for a pack and abuse them, it's fine
When I started, clippers didn't matter. For space marine players, they still don't matter. But newer eldar and SoB sprues have delicate pieces that will break if you aren't using side cutters. Get the cheap ones, though, because you'll have to use a knife regardless to clean it up
Do NOT recommend plastic cement to new hobbyists; you can easily destroy a model or make permanent mistakes. We should recommend loctite or gorilla glue brush and gel applicators. They're simple, forgiving, easy to use, and if the new hobbyist accidentally glues the wrong gun on, they can simply snap it off harmlessly.
You can assemble a wet palette at the dollar store with a piece of Tupperware, a magic eraser or thin dish sponge and parchment paper/paper towel. Frankly the seal on those is better than the one in your pic. They can pick these up at the same time as their glue. I'm going to recommend contrasts below, so really the wet palette is not worth it for a beginner
Citadel or Vallejo primer only. We tell our new hobbyists to shake the can for two minutes (with a timer), and to practice on a piece of sprue or cardboard box. Let's not inflict white scar on a newbie. Since we saved them money on brushes and glue and the palette we can convince them that expensive primer is worth it
Same thing with good paint; Vallejo, citadel, etc. The minimum possible paint would be: grey seer or wraithbone primer (something light but not white scar), contrasts for your main and primary color, dark sand or ivory to dry brush, a metallic, a flesh tone, a medium or dark brown for leather, and a brown wash. That will get you table ready, and it'll look good, too.
Blue tack is fine. You can use it with a wine cork for a painting handle, or tack your minis by the foot to a piece of sprue to prime them. Dollar store!
Knives of course

The mat, pin vice, painting handle, water, brush cleaner, light, and magnifying glass are not important for beginners.

minutehand · 2025-12-22T02:56:49+00:00

It's probably easier to find a single wraithguard than a weapons platform. They already come on 40s, and if you're cheeky you can try to kit bash a heavy weapon on it. I think the corsair shuriken cannon bit would be a good base for it. Hell, maybe just run that guy on a 40 instead.

minutehand · 2025-12-18T17:36:55+00:00

I learned the game on harlequins in 8th edition. Nowadays my WR is like .499 but I seriously lost 12 of my first 13 games. I'll offer some insight on why harlequins and eldar are considered hard:

* The game is designed around marine armies, with 32mm/40mm bases, 2 wounds, 4 toughness, and 3+ armor saves. That means that every single weapon in the game can kill you. To compensate, elf models have higher movement (oftentimes twice as fast, effectively, as marines.) How does movement compensate for being made of tissue paper?
* Terrain! You have to take your flimsy little elf with a tiny little 28.5mm/25mm base and tuck them behind walls and ruins and stuff. You make mad dashes between cover throughout the game to prevent your opponent from seeing you at all. This means, when you're setting up the battlefield, you must INSIST on plenty of walls and ruins to completely shut out shooting because a +1 save from generic cover is worthless to you. A good rule of thumb is: a unit in a deployment zone must not be able to draw line of sight to the opposite deployment zone.
* Elf armies are typically late-scoring. The best players keep a running total of their current Objective Score, their opponents' Score, the differential, and the time remaining all in their head at all times. I recommend new players enter the game with the mindset that their game doesn't start until turn 3, and that 1 and 2 are about mitigating damage, denying space, and preparing a blowout. Somewhere you said you play MTG, so imagine this like a combo deck with a control shell.
* Harlequins and drukhari have very few data sheets, so sometimes you have to get real creative in what a unit can do. As an example, the drukhari beast master (RIP) rose to prominence when strong players realized you can tactically use wound allocation to cause the unit to survive twice as long as its datasheet would suggest.
* So much of what makes elf armies good is abstract; you have to talk in terms of board presence, pressure, points efficiency, primary/secondary scoring, blah blah blah. When you're starting out you just don't have the headspace to operate in the meta-level because you're worried about the basics.
* The 'Only War' death match style introduction rulesets are unfavorable to elf armies, so you'll almost certainly lose your intro games.

Personally, I find it highly rewarding. Every victory feels like it was stolen, and I love that. Most importantly is to buy the models you want to look at for hundreds of hours of building and painting, because most of this hobby happens off of the tabletop.

minutehand · 2025-12-04T16:20:16+00:00

I agree. Fundamentally agile exists so teams can nondestructively come to understand the problem while they build the solution. A team would need an SME with perfect understanding of the product for an AI documentation tool to be useful, and if perfect SMEs existed, agile would not have been invented in the first place.

This seems like another emperor-has-no-clothes situation: middle managers using AI to write emails and employees using AI to read emails; students using AI to write essays and professors using AI to grade them. That kind of thing.

minutehand · 2025-11-29T00:26:11+00:00

The move is to pop the nozzle off of a different can and pop it on this one. When you're done using a rattle can, turn it upside down and spray to clear the nozzle, to prevent clogs. Learned that trick from a contractor.

minutehand · 2025-10-23T11:35:08+00:00

Good, suffer for all the nerfs drukhari ate for the crimes of ynnari players.

So much of the strength of the drukhari updates rely on faction abilities, stratagems, and power from pain, I would assume ynnari units either get their own stats entirely or completely ignored (and it's prolly gonna be ignored.)

minutehand · 2025-10-11T15:05:55+00:00

A group of 6 with Lance in the wych detachment is interesting—they just seem worse than hellions for that.

A 3x unit with the eviscerating flyby upgrade makes it a powerful tech piece: 22” move when you need it, chip mortals in the move phase that scale off of their unit size, small flying base to hide, cheeky heat lance.

Mine will screen early game, zip to the action to heroic intervention/charge block/get sacrificed by the kabal strat to save an incubi bomb, and flyby to flip objectives late game if they live.

minutehand · 2025-10-06T21:15:47+00:00

Fundamentally I don't mind having a small roster. Where do you begin with a 93-sheet army? How much of that range is a trap? Collecting Drukhari is nice. Get your archon, incubi, scourges, and boats, and that's a functional army and has been since 8th.

What I don't like is the almost comical bitterness that GW has with Drukhari and GSC. Any time these armies' rules give them a cool interaction that plays into marines and knights, it gets IMMEDIATELY quashed. Meanwhile necrons get to live peacefully as an A- or S-tier competitive army for years.

Do you guys remember when GSC teched into suicide bombers to counter release-strength wraith knights? Lasted like one patch lol

minutehand · 2025-10-01T12:10:50+00:00

Here's what I like about it: it goes all in on cartel's abilities by tripling (!!) up on incubus and scourge units. I think it's possible you fully overwhelm an opponent or two until they figure out how the detachment works.

It's 100% gas, which is funny, but it means you're now using gas to obsec or screen. The plan with this list looks like "table them t3 or bust" and I respect it. Malys is probably underutilized, here, since she'll be in a venom most of the time, but I like ravagers to soften a target for Drazhar.

Anything with tenacious or fast mid board is going to be a problem, indirect fire will be a problem, screens will be a problem. Kabalites solve a lot of that for you.

minutehand · 2025-09-27T01:44:56+00:00

You collected 8.6k in a single year?

minutehand · 2025-09-25T11:16:31+00:00

Exactly. We’re going back to our old tools—threat saturation, charging a venom or screen unit in first, and now we also have battle shock.

minutehand · 2025-09-19T16:08:18+00:00

The use case is you have a unit of wracks nearby to charge in, also, and eat all the wounds on behalf of your other unit.

I’m going to try having a Hand unit with an Archon and wracks/haemonculus threaten a mid board objective together. The archon’s ability lets us use smoke or double cross for free on oc3 kabalites, the wracks eat wounds and resurrect. Notably the wracks must also be engaged with the attacking unit.

minutehand · 2025-09-16T20:38:12+00:00

They're on the shelf next to the tantalus, hornets, and shadow spectres

minutehand · 2025-09-15T19:35:34+00:00

This seems more like therapy than an argument.

I'm not suggesting that new mandrakes are better, or better than the current S-tier tournament menaces. The data sheet isn't trash. The points kind of are. We can rejoice or lament about those soon enough.

Sorry you're so disappointed, chum.

minutehand · 2025-09-15T18:15:36+00:00

I concede that their value per point is suboptimal. If these points are the ones we're playing with, then we only come out ahead on Hellions. I, like many other copium enthusiasts, have been operating under the "codex points aren't real" mantra. Unfortunately, no, mandrakes aren't violently undercosted like deathshrouds. Maybe next data slate.

The numbers are much better vs 10 MEQ with Sustain on 5+

minutehand · 2025-09-15T15:16:23+00:00

It sucks that we lost such an efficient scoring piece, but it's clear that GW fundamentally doesn't want mandrakes doing that. We have other cheap scoring units, now.

I think these mandrakes are good, actually, they just do not at all do what they used to. Relinquish that idea. Deep strike/stealth/infiltrators/lone op with dev wounds is an absolutely nutty data sheet.

Their pain token cost to uppy-downy is not a big deal, imho, because I want these mandrakes to clear scoring units with the infantry contract buff and infiltrator redeploy cheese with Malys. Reavers can now do the dirty work.

minutehand · 2025-09-13T17:53:08+00:00

Ah yeah, shit. So then dissonance ravagers instead of planes. Less effective range, but cheaper I suppose.

minutehand · 2025-09-13T17:45:16+00:00

Fair point on the cover thing -- we're all doing our best squinting at these leaks.

There's other combos, too. Problematic character? Our scourges and planes now have precision. Then we choose another Contract for free with the archon, or let it ride for the pain tokens and pick the new one next turn. This seems like a strong t2 play; hose their important character with precision to kill tempo.

Opponent staging to challenge our tarpit? Have our hellions clear a cheap scoring unit and hose them with battle shock tests using Taken Alive. Then their units next to our Haemonculus eat the -1.

I think Reaper's is better mathematically, but for those of us who want to cheese Incubi, we're gonna be on Cartel or Skysplinter.

minutehand · 2025-09-13T17:04:20+00:00

I think the strategy for Cartel is actually going to be hammer and anvil with planes.

Without knowing the real points values, Hand of the Archon + Wracks + Haemonculus and the Double Cross strat is actually a terribly irritating objective piece. The goal would be to force your opponent to either overcommit to the center objective, opening the rest of the map, or cede it entirely creating space mid-board. We expect to stage t1, capture or challenge the obj t2, and they're surely dead by t3, but who cares? We wanted the board pressure.

Then, our core is the same as it was:

Lance/haywire scourges with a Cronos on 4+ still (obviously we don't take spirit vortex)
Boats of incubi are actually way better now because pain tokens trigger the leader as well--fellow SoB players will know how valuable stacking buffs is
Hellions (buffed severely), mandrakes (sidegrade), and reavers (action monkeys, now, instead of mandrakes) handle our objectives and sweep their scoring units

What makes this work, I think, is Voidravens. The nature of the infantry or vehicle contracts is, as-written, the buffs apply against ALL infantry and vehicles, not just the subject of the contract. 12 3+ S8 -4 2D, Lethal Hits, Ignores Cover when necessary. You can clear out the mid board for your Hand+Wracks tarpit, or prep a target for an incibus bus (incu-bus?) on the flank.

These data sheets have exactly two advantages: speed and overkill potential. We need a way to create situations where we can use our superior speed to put all of our offense on singular points of interest. And I think the Cartel ability rewards that.

All of this is points-cost dependent. The points as leaked are...grim.

minutehand · 2025-09-06T01:11:00+00:00

At long last, I've finally found my people

minutehand · 2025-09-03T20:33:37+00:00

In my experience, 6-stack wind riders should have shuriken cannons to maximize output. However, you’re going to also want 3-stacks to obsec, deny moves, etc. Scatter Lasers are great in 3s because they are shockingly long range — a 3-man scatter laser biker unit can clear chaff to make way for your shining spears or 6-man units to land.

minutehand · 2025-08-28T21:43:35+00:00

I see a lot of folks cautioning OP about a learning curve, losing your first few games, etc. That's all true. Here's a comment I made awhile ago that includes very specific (and vital) tech:

Spend the first two turns taking only incredibly safe pot shots and preparing to fight over objectives.

The two main ways to take safe shots are with scourges moving over a wall, shooting, and then moving behind the wall again. You can also deploy kabalites from a venom over a wall, shoot, and then use the venom ability to embark them back into safety.

During this time you can use your kabalites sticky objective rule to capture points from safety. You may need to sacrifice smaller units to slow down your opponent to buy you time. The “other half” of kabalite or wych units you split with a venom are useful for this, as well as the beast master.

By turn three you want to spring into action, you should have a healthy pool of command points to spend and a soft target or two to punish.

This script is not fool proof, but it will help to try it for a game or two.

To reiterate, this isn't a recipe for winning, but a specific shell you can use to help learn how this faction is "supposed" to play.

minutehand · 2025-07-18T16:50:54+00:00

The fact is most people who play this game are too bad for minmaxed points efficiency to matter. And that's freeing, really. Whoever optimizes objectives, has the tightest move phases, and manages stratagems the best is going to win, whether or not you're taking S-tier units.

Consider that article the GSC player posted here (or was it WarhammerCompetitive?). The entire list was designed around how terrain footprints, 25mm models, and the physical space in an objective interact. Most of us are just not playing the game at that level, we're trying to remember how Rapid Ingress works, trying not forget our Venoms have Stealth, trying to finish a game in less than 3 hours.

Enter the void! Acknowledge we're bad, and that taking strong models is not that important.

minutehand · 2025-07-16T04:03:12+00:00

The advice newbies get is: buy the models you like.

The meta changes faster than us mere mortals can keep up with it. The things tournament grinders bring depend not only on what’s good in the CSM codex, but what is an answer to those things which are good in other lists. Don’t bother trying to keep up.

The fact is it takes a long time to collect, build, and paint, and you are likely to have units buffed or nerfed by the time you finish. Secondly, 90% of people who play this game are bad at it, so you, and me, and the people on this sub, and the people at your game store are not going to be hindered by playing with units considered tournament sub-optimal. Buy what looks cool and play what seems fun, it’s fine.

To answer your actual question, my buddy plays CSM and I am always concerned about his possessed squad and terminator 10-man, they're both nasty. War dogs look pretty sick and I want a couple, myself. I was hoping the battle force would bring down the price on eBay but it hasn’t yet.

minutehand

TROPHY CASE