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Recycled actually. The local recycling centre said they accept model kit sprues, so off they went into the recycling bin.

I was originally a fan of these, ever since I got a free sprue right when Mantic started up. Since then, I amassed about 100 of them at various places clearing them at 75% off or so. I painted 10 or so, stripped them and painted them again. I thought to myself that maybe they'll look better in a larger mass, so I painted more-- a regiment of spear elves this time. I set up the 20 or so I had painted on a movement tray and left them for a day to give myself fresh eyes on them.

And the recycling bin was the next step.

I really like the KoW rules and while I used to be a fan of the elves, I just can't bring myself to paint and field them. As you can see below, they didn't turn out that badly (the picture is of my first attempt-- the second group were spearelves and I didn't bother with pictures). So I'm going with Kingdoms of Men and using some of the great plastic historicals that are available.



I'm sure the smart thing would have been to try to sell them or to give them away to someone who wants them more than me, but it actually felt good to toss them in the recycling bin. Hopefully they'll have a more fulfilling next life as a bucket or bag or something.

You could have sold 'em easy, especially a lot of 100.

Or donated them to a local orphanage, I did that with a couple of 40k armies I owned.

I could have done lots of things, including finishing them and playing games with them. I just hit the point of not wanting to see them again and having it be immediately over and done with. At least the orphans will be spared sharing in my frustration.

Thought some more about this. Things I really liked about the elves:

My first contact with GW-like plastic that wasn't done by GW. I was excited that the market might be expanding in terms of plastic kit manufacturers. I had seen the Zvezda 'Ring of Rule' stuff and Warzone and a variety of other plastics but none were quite the same as these Mantic elves.

The obviously not-human look. Most fantasy elves are thinner than average humans with pointy ears and less body hair. Often they are human+ or some sort of fanfic fantasy "better at being humans than humans" thing going on like the Minbari in Babylon 5 and perhaps Vulcans from ST.

The price. They were cheap and still are. You can build a really big army for really cheap and things get even more affordable when you buy the army sets or detachments or whatever.

Over the last couple years, my opinions have shifted.

On the modelling front, I now think their proportions are terrible. While they are attempting to look lithe, their body proportions are more impossible than Barbie's waist. Despite making a good number of sprues, there are actually only a few body types and lots of parts are replicated on one sprue to another.

The weapon choices made are also a bit baffling. Like having the scouts have sort of a nonsensical combination of drawn weapons and held bows. And the shield arms on the archers have gotten a lot of well deserved criticism.

I've also grown more fond of the stereotypical human+ elves. There's a reason for their enduring popularity. In terms of gaming culture, D&D did the most to introduce the idea of fantasy elves and while it's all well and good to be original, Mantic probably would have been better served with a more traditional approach.

Hard plastic miniature production has exploded with new kits coming out all the time. Renedra (a plastic toolmaker and producer with a staff full of history with GW) is booked solid and new kits are coming out all the time. You also have Chinese manufacturers like Wargames Factory doing their own stuff as well as taking on 3rd party projects like the fanastic DreamForge stuff.

The price of the elves now actually looks pretty bad to me. It's true that I paid only 25% of MSRP because the elves were on clearance at lots and lots of places, but even at that price I don't think I value them. Comparing what you can get at the same retail price from the likes of Warlord, Gripping Beast, Perry or Victrix puts Mantic's elves square in the bad value category, considering the sculpts and shortcuts taken on sprue design, re-use of parts and weapon choices.

Mantic has also learned a ton since they came out. Their Dwarf line has similar problems in terms of a unique appearance, but they are still quite a bit better. Their undead show what Mantic is truly capable of and will probably remain a favorite of many for quite some time.

I'm actually kind of surprised Mantic survived launching with their elves as their first product. I am glad that they did as their quality has improved dramatically since the elves were released.

I got some of the elves in a grab box type thing and I am as unimpressed with them in person as I was by the website pictures. I found the proportions really offputting then and still do. I wouldn't mind a more "fey" styled elf at all, even one that was a lot smaller than human figures. I think done properly it could be really cool. However, whatever they were going for with those elves, it fell short for me. A lot of the rest of the range is really weak as well in my opinion- the drake cavalry are some of the worst miniatures I've seen in years. So I agree, it is surprising that Mantic survived with such a poor first offering, but I think everyone was just very excited by low cost plastics. I think their Dwarves and Orcs are okay, not amazing but grand for the price. Their undead are by far and away their best range, and I have plenty of them. I hope that the completed line gains some more consistency.

Who sculpted the elves out of interest?

I've heard that Mantic's Undead were their savior.
Their skellies, zombies and ghouls really are nicely done and super duper cheap.

I have 3 units of Mantic elves in my KoW good army.
They are not the best minis but they're passable for what I need.

I actually rather like their elves - but then I use them more for trouping fey - the Shining Host.

Their proportions aren't natural, and their weapons are poisoned - causing strokes. (The term 'stroke' was originally 'elf-stroke'.)

They are not human in any regard....

Sorry that they were not to your taste, but I do think melting them down was a bit petty, better to sell them or give them away - and your paint jobs were not at all bad.

That said.... I really like the Mantic Undead, they definitely seem to have a wider audience than either the dwarfs or the elves.

The Auld Grump - the term 'oaf' comes from Ouphe - the changelings that faeries leave behind when they steal a child....

could not stand the actual models....far too thin...and thats with the armour........

 TheAuldGrump wrote:
I actually rather like their elves - but then I use them more for trouping fey - the Shining Host.

Their proportions aren't natural, and their weapons are poisoned - causing strokes. (The term 'stroke' was originally 'elf-stroke'.)

They are not human in any regard....

This is exactly the sort of thing I was telling myself and others when I liked them. I think I was trying to shift my expectations for what elves should look like to make them more palatable.

Sorry that they were not to your taste, but I do think melting them down was a bit petty, better to sell them or give them away - and your paint jobs were not at all bad.

I didn't recycle them to be petty. One thing I've learned about myself over the years is that I am an anti-collector. I don't hold onto things for the sake of holding on to them. If something is no longer of value to me I try to give it away, sell it or recycle it. I did consider giving them away but no one local I know either likes them or plays ranked up fantasy games and shipping via Canada Post is so expensive that I'd likely end up paying more than I paid for them to send them to someone else. I'd also have to source a proper sized box and advertise and whatnot.

That said.... I really like the Mantic Undead, they definitely seem to have a wider audience than either the dwarfs or the elves.

I think it's because they didn't break with tradition. The undead look like walking skeletons with the remnants of medieval armour. Even their ghouls, the most out there of the sculpts, pretty much looks like what you see when you type "ghoul" into an image search. The dwarves have a partial break with tradition with their sharp coiled beards and exaggerated wide faces. Imagine the following but replace the face and beard with a traditional norse style human bearded face rather than the ancient Sumerian coiled bearded mutant face:



I also think they should have went with either squarish roman-esque shields or round viking style shields.

The orcs are sort of a hybrid of traditional fantasy/D&D orcs and GW's hunched green fanged apes. I think they are alright, but not as good as the undead.

The Auld Grump - the term 'oaf' comes from Ouphe - the changelings that faeries leave behind when they steal a child....

Part of me thinks that they ended up at a half measure. It's like they wanted to make a fae inspired elf line but also wanted to incorporate traditional fantasy elf elements and ended up in a less than pleasing middle ground.

EDIT: My favorite elf miniatures of all time are Tom Meier's Thunderbolt Mountain elf range:


Metal (so pricey) but very nice.

 frozenwastes wrote:

 TheAuldGrump wrote:
I actually rather like their elves - but then I use them more for trouping fey - the Shining Host.

Their proportions aren't natural, and their weapons are poisoned - causing strokes. (The term 'stroke' was originally 'elf-stroke'.)

They are not human in any regard....

This is exactly the sort of thing I was telling myself and others when I liked them. I think I was trying to shift my expectations for what elves should look like to make them more palatable.

That said.... I really like the Mantic Undead, they definitely seem to have a wider audience than either the dwarfs or the elves.

I think it's because they didn't break with tradition. The undead look like walking skeletons with the remnants of medieval armour. Even their ghouls, the most out there of the sculpts, pretty much looks like what you see when you type "ghoul" into an image search. The dwarves have a partial break with tradition with their sharp coiled beards and exaggerated wide faces. Imagine the following but replace the face and beard with a traditional norse style human bearded face rather than the ancient Sumerian coiled bearded mutant face:



I also think they should have went with either squarish roman-esque shields or round viking style shields.

The orcs are sort of a hybrid of traditional fantasy/D&D orcs and GW's hunched green fanged apes. I think they are alright, but not as good as the undead.

The Auld Grump - the term 'oaf' comes from Ouphe - the changelings that faeries leave behind when they steal a child....

Part of me thinks that they ended up at a half measure. It's like they wanted to make a fae inspired elf line but also wanted to incorporate traditional fantasy elf elements and ended up in a less than pleasing middle ground.

EDIT: My favorite elf miniatures of all time are Tom Meier's Thunderbolt Mountain elf range:


Metal (so pricey) but very nice.

Again, I kind of disagree - the Mantic elves remind me of Lord Dunsany more than Tolkien - more akin to the actual traditional faerie folk.

Another example is The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson. I read Anderson's book before encountering Tolkien. By the time I read Lord of the Rings my mental picture of elves was already set.

It is only that folks expect Tolkien elves, and many companies, such as GW, keep producing those Tolkien elves until folks think that is the way elves have always been.

Tom Meier's elves are fantastic - I have one of his flying swan ships... if only it were to the same scale.

The Fantasy Armies line of elves, from what used to be Ral Partha, mix well with the Mantic elves.

The Dwarfs... I like them better than GW dwarfs, but I really wish that there were more poses. So... I use the Mantic dwarfs for wargaming, and Reaper for general purpose. (And, more recently, Stonehaven.)

For that matter, I like the old poseable plastic dwarfs by GW more than the Mantic dwarfs, but that came down to using them for Mordheim and RPGs - being able to cobble together just the right miniature? Heaven.

The Auld Grump

By traditional, I meant traditional within the late 20th century fantasy genre rather than traditional in folklore.

As for the Ral Partha fantasy army elves, I think they are way better than Mantics. I think they mix with Mantic only because they lie somewhere between traditional elves and Mantic's alien looking ones.



As you can see, they don't really have the same issues of being completely anatomically impossible like the Mantic ones. They're still available if anyone is interested in them, but being metal, they're now £1.75 a piece or 6 for £8.95.

One thing I do like about Mantic a lot is their fantasy stuff has pulled back from the unrealistic proportions GW has been pushing. I think the elves go too far in the other direction, but they nailed it with their undead.

I'm actually kind of surprised Mantic survived launching with their elves as their first product. I am glad that they did as their quality has improved dramatically since the elves were released.

I'm certain they had some pretty heavy seed capital to start with, you can tell when it ran out, just after the dwarf line they stopped with the fancy artwork, expensive paintjob, and cut back on the frills like stickers and posters/painting guides in the boxes.

And the models went from 10-man sprues, to 2-man sprues to half of a 2-man sprue (steel warriors) before they finally cancelled hard plastic altogether and went all-restic for 2-3 years instead to make sure that they could pay the bills.

They're starting to dip their toe into hard plastic again, but a recent setback (the infamous chinese goblins) has set that back at least another year, I think.

The undead being a *huge* hit was the thing that saved them in the early days. Elves still haven't paid for their tooling costs.

That makes a lot of sense. I know there was a creative vision for the elves that was different than what's "normal" but I think it's safe to say that it was a mistake. In the realm of woulda-shoulda-coulda I think Mantic should have lead with sci-fi powered armour humans rather than with elves for fantasy and certainly not weird disproportional elves that don't mix well with much released since Ral Partha was a major player.

And as for what would have been in vogue at the time for powered armour, a time frame based image search shows that probably something that looks like Fallout Brotherhood of Steel power armour would have been a good source of inspiration:



Though the iron man inspired Enforcers are great as well. A gas mask style face and a bit more on the shoulders and they'd make great Brotherhood of Steel miniatures. And the deadzone ones are even better than the originals:



For those who are curious, here's my original thread about the elves when I first painted them and liked them:

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/417368.page

I definitely grew less enthusiastic and less tolerant of the shallow detail since then.

Every few months i look at the Mantic Elves again trying to like them. It usually coincides with looking at WHFB High Elves and thinking for the billionth time about making an army, if only the HE spearmen and archers weren't complete crap. I keep looking at Mantic Elves, trying to figure a way to do headswaps or weapon swaps or legswaps or something, anything, to make them look not-terrible, and I just can't.

People say they look thin and lithe and agile. They don't, they just look awkwardly thin. They look malformed thin. I love human+ elves, I love Tolkien elves and Warhammer elves and Warcraft elves (the high/blood elves at least). I used to think they looked like bad D&D elves, but it only recently struck me that they feel more like an attempt at elfquest elves, and a bad attempt at that. I really wish they'd done a different army first and saved the elves for after they had more experience making armies.

I can't help but wish Mantic had just made plastic versions of The Russian Alternative elves

I agree those elves look horrible, good decision binning them. I am not too found of the dwarf model in this thread. It is not bad but I just dont like it.

I have to ask the OP why he bought those models in the first place. I really don't like the 'first generation' of their models. Not necessarily for the proportions but because they simply aren't very well sculpted.

(Compared to Raging Heroes, Wargods, well a fair amount of other companies these days.)

They were poor models but you could buy them by the bucket load.

Then they bought out DreadBall - The FF and Marauders in that set are far, far better than their initial generation of models. I really like those. Then the Plague models in DeadZone - again much better sculpting, detail than Mantic's first efforts.

They do still bring out models that I think are simply ugly and poorly done - I was very disappointed in several of the DB that came afterwards but I have high hopes for DeadZone models.

I played against an entire Mantic army once (Elves). It looked rubbish on the table but I guess it was cheap? Their zombies are pretty awesome though...

 Souleater wrote:
I have to ask the OP why he bought those models in the first place. I really don't like the 'first generation' of their models. Not necessarily for the proportions but because they simply aren't very well sculpted.

I thought I covered that pretty thoroughly. I got the free sprue they sent out. I built one and thought it looked alright and as an impulse buy in the future I added a box of scouts to an order I made somewhere. I got those and put them in a drawer for a couple years and then painted them when KoW was starting to get going locally. I painted them up (pic and link to more pics in previous posts) and thought that while the detail was shallow, it was there and washes brought it out really well.

I noticed lots of places where clearing them at 75% off and bought 100 models for very, very cheap. When I painted the spearmen, I realized I had enough of their proportions and even putting 20 of them into a regiment didn't save them in my eyes. I also then noticed just how lazy the sprue design was and how terrible the archers look and all the other problems. I guess you could say I bought them on the basis of their price @ 75% off and on the scouts themselves being pretty much the best of the hard plastic elves they make only in that they are too simple to truly demonstrate the problems with the larger sprues.





Automatically Appended Next Post:

 John Rainbow wrote:
I played against an entire Mantic army once (Elves). It looked rubbish on the table but I guess it was cheap?

It's sad that not even the mass effect saves them.

They're cheap if you go with the larger sets, but if you go with the smaller regiment boxes then they're actually not any better than going with some of the excellent plastic historicals that have come out.

£15 for 20 of Mantic's elves = 75p per elf

or

£20 for 48 of Fireforge's stuff = 42p per foot knight



or

£20 for 44 of Gripping Beast Vikings = 45p per viking



£18 for 40 of Perry WOTR = 45p per soldier



£23 for 48 Victrix Hoplites = 48p per hoplite



Companies like Perry, Fireforge, Victrix and Gripping Beast are showing what can be done with hard plastic in term economical figures that still look great. Mantic's elves were an early example of what not to do with that particular format. I'm actually thinking that if you wanted to do plastic elves right now, go with Fireforge's templars and paint their cloaks green or blue or something and maybe do some head swaps or add some green stuff to their heads. The idea of elven crusaders driving the human vermin from their holy sites is actually kind of cool as well.

I'm really not sure what the deal is with mantic and things like the elves or the battle nuns or whatever, but they're only a budget option compared to GW and not the wider market.

Mantic Models are ALL about buying the Army boxes. The discounts become pretty significant.

I've had a messenger bag full of a huge Mantic Elf army sitting in my closet since "Name a Regiment" contest with the 'Ironwatch' winning.

I really wish I had gone with the Undead stuff, as at least then I would have zombies/skeletons to mix in for my Vampire Counts army for some variety.

I can't bring myself to get rid of them/sell them off, as it seems it would just be rude...but I just can't bring myself to actually do anything with them either. They're not awful, but I hate the aesthetic.

I hate the fact that they are fully armored Elves, wearing plate armor, that are skinnier than skeletons. It boggles my mind. I kept thinking "They can't be that bad", and I had been wanting to start a High Elf army at the time.
The real saving grace for me are all the sprue extras. The cats are being used for my High Elf army now to decorate the bases for my White Lions.

This thread reminded me that I need to buy some of those Fireforge figures, and also need to assemble and paint my Vikings, Perrys and Greeks...

 Kanluwen wrote:


I hate the fact that they are fully armored Elves, wearing plate armor, that are skinnier than skeletons. It boggles my mind. I kept thinking "They can't be that bad", and I had been wanting to start a High Elf army at the time.
The real saving grace for me are all the sprue extras. The cats are being used for my High Elf army now to decorate the bases for my White Lions.

Are they fully armored? I know they're often painted that way, but I don't know why. Their 'armor' looks like leather at best to me. I have a full army of them and had planned on undercoating them brown for the leather armor...

It's actual armor plating, with chainmail underneath.

There's some leather bits like their gloves and boots, but it's plates and that hurts my brain.

 Kanluwen wrote:
It's actual armor plating, with chainmail underneath.

There's some leather bits like their gloves and boots, but it's plates and that hurts my brain.

its not plate armor, its tinfoil, they're afraid the aliens will get them

With tiny bodies and huge heads, they're obviously the greys in this situation. They even have probing spears.

Honestly, not to tote my own desires, but you are a selfish donkey-cave for throwing them away when I CERTAIN there are many on the board who would have paid you to ship them to them.

I personally wouldnt like them but there are many who would...making you a dick

A bit firm of language, but I overall agree with jcrone. Seems a bit wasteful to bin them when just posting a thread on the swap shop or something asking for postage and maybe ten bucks for your trouble would have given you a response within a couple hours...

He didn't just "trash them".

He recycled them.

Yep. I like to think I improved them by sending them on to their next life as part of a piece of plastic furniture, or perhaps a jug or rain barrel.

Also, the fact that someone wants what I no longer want doesn't mean they are entitled to have it nor that I'm responsible for finding such a person and passing the miniatures along them. If I want to send them through a shredder or extruder so they can be made into something else, that's my choice.

If that makes me a bad person in anyone's eyes, I don't think I'll lose any sleep over it. If anyone else wants to mourn the fact that someone, somewhere didn't get a bunch of mantic elves for the cost of shipping, they're more than welcome to spend their time doing so.

Agreed. Your toys. Bin 'em if you want.

Though going on-line and making a point of saying you did seems like you were obviously wanting someone to make comment on the action.