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I';ve been wresting recently with the age old dillemma, do I go for the army with the pretty models, or the one that is most effective?

In my case, its been Eldar vs Imperial Guard. I like the bright colours of the eldar and the sleekness of the models, but the Imperial Guard is simply a better more effective shooty army, which is what I am looking to play. How does one decide?

So I figured what do you guy usualy do in this common situation. Especially if you like the fluff of both armies?

Which would you enjoy painting more? Considering you're going to spend a lot of time painting and converting these little dudes, you want to work with the ones you'll enjoy most.

Eldar I suspect, the IG are a bit too monotonous, and I already have a green ork army. I wonder how much variety you can fit in a modern army...

But the Eldar, colours, crazy colours everywhere!

You can do a lot with mixing different IG regiments, but you seem to have pretty much answered your own question here There aren't enough Eldar players.

I went with the pretty models to start with.

I still pick models I like the look of over the models that may be the "deathstar" unit.

No matter how many people tell me how uber Wolfy McWolf with wolfclaws on his bigbadcyberwolf is, it's still a naff model so even if I played SW, I still wouldn't get it.

Trust me, the eldar are anything but ineffective.
Especially considering dire avengers dont use pos lasguns :l

it's not the army it's the player and his list

Eldar seem to be your preference going by your posts so go with them, plus they can be very shooty if you want then to be.

If you don't like the eldar codex but love the models you could possibly use the DE codex, with eldar as proxies. Maybe banshees for incubi, scorpions for wyches, falcons for raiders, wraithlord as talos etc?

I would go for the one you prefer the look of.
As stated before you'll no doubt spend a large chunk of your time 'creating' your army (depending on how you involve yourself in the hobby and how much you invest in painting/modelling), and this will likely inform how you play. You'll probably find you're not as involved or interested if you build any army you don't like the look of.

There's nothing saying you can't make an effective eldar gun-line anyway.

The downside of choosing models you like the look of (as opposed to models you enjoy the performance of) is DAMN YOU SWOOPING HAWKS.