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Hello All,

I was digging into my closet and I found some 'stuff.'
I have here, a Couldren Hag I believe, 4-5 metal corsairs, and 2 Boxes of the plastic Corsairs.

So, I can make the following:

Hag as Sorceress.
15ish man 2 HW Corsair block with command and banner I suppose.
10 man Hand bow Corsairs.

I have the armybook, but not on me so the points is pretty low I can tell roughly 400-500.
You think I can get a good intro game with just this stuff?

At the very least it could be a painting project.
-Brown w/ Black Wash Sea Cloaks.
-Midnight Blue and Aquamarine highlights for armor.

Interesting selection of models there. Sadly though you will struggle to get a basic army out of it. At 400-500 points you are limited to 100-125 points for a Hero/Lord Choice, so you'd only really be able to get a fairly basic Sorceress or Death Hag. Plus you'd need to get 3 units out of that lot (armies must have a minimum of 3 units that aren't characters).

My recommendation would be something like this:

Heroes:

Sorcress: Talisman of Protection or Tome of Furion (that's a 6+ ward or an additional spell) 115pts

Core:

Corsairs: x10, Full Command, Sea Serpent Standard 150pts

Corsairs: x10, Full Command, Repeater Handbows 125pts

Special:

Shades: x5, Bloodshade, Light Armour, AHW 108pts

Total: 498pts

It's not much of an army and I have pumped a lot of points in to the shades but with the selection of models you have the options are limited. Converting plastic corsairs into Shades should be pretty simple.

I would say you should add some repeater crossbowmen into the mix and maybe a Battlestandard Bearer and a chariot/hydra/reaper bolt thrower to gain a wider view on how dark elves as a whole works. Not a dark elves player myself but that is what I would get in addition to what you have, that should get you to 750 points or so maybe? *shrugs*
Though you should also aim to get the units up to like atleast 20 models, so they can take a few hits and carry on fighting.

I hope you will enjoy those Dark Elves

I'd recommend that you build all of your plastic corsairs as Additional Hand Weapon ones. You'll very rarely (if ever) find yourself wanting Handbow Corsairs, but a big 7x or 6x4 block of AHW Corsairs with the Sea Serpent Standard can really lay on some pain with Shadow Hex support.

In a 500pt game of "I'm testing out an army" I don't know of too many people who would begrudge you proxying in movement trays as infantry.

Dark Elves at 500pts is a little funky. All of our characters are expensive because they have built-in costs unlike more customizable heroes like Skaven Chieftans Engineers. The only 500pt games I played were the ones that allowed you to make a Champion upgrade your general. A lv.1 Sorceress isn't going to help as much as her 100+ point cost warrants.

If you must have both a Hero and 500pt game, I'd probably do something like this to give you a taste of Dark Elves:
Sorceress - Tome of Furion - 115
14x AHW Corsairs - Sea Serpent Standard - 175
11x Crossbowmen - 110
Cold One Chariot - 100
Total: 500

500 points is really tricky for Dark Elves as Kirbinator has said. Magic isn't effective, and unless your running spears you really won't have large blocks of troops to mess with (meaning 1 bad combat and the game is over).

I would say that 750 or even 1000 points would be better to test out an army; simply tell your opponent that your considering buying the army if you like how it plays - had a friend do that for over a year as he experimented with 6 different armies before finally finding a play style that he liked (he enjoyed the models from each army so effectiveness on the table was the final decision).