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My brief experience of Mantic thus far had been pretty shocking.

But having enjoyed playing Deadzone at the club where I play, I got my hands on a Rebs faction starter set and have put them together. Using decent superglue in a handy pen-style bottle helped greatly. The amount of extra material I needed to remove, however, was quite something... Had to change the blade on my craft knife after this!

Still don't think Mantic can touch GW's model quality, but am now at least satisfied that I can work with their models. Will see how painting goes...

I feel your pain,mate! I bought a sizeable amount of their Abyssal forces, and while the plastic models are fine, I have major issues with the resin. Even worse, this stuff they call restic. It is crap. It has no saving qualities,very rough and very very warped out of shape(even when soaking it in hot water).
If Mantic are serious about being the cheaper alternative to GW then they need to stop all this experimentation with various different casting concoctions and go 100% plastic.

Slipstream wrote:
I feel your pain,mate! I bought a sizeable amount of their Abyssal forces, and while the plastic models are fine, I have major issues with the resin. Even worse, this stuff they call restic. It is crap. It has no saving qualities,very rough and very very warped out of shape(even when soaking it in hot water).
If Mantic are serious about being the cheaper alternative to GW then they need to stop all this experimentation with various different casting concoctions and go 100% plastic.

Yeah, the PVC (which I believe is the restic) is bad. I think the Deadzone stuff is PVC - needs superglue - needs lots of prep, too.

This sums up my feelings on Mantic.

Their plastic and metal stuff is fine.
The restic stuff though (resin and plastic mix) is just terrible.
It feels poor quality, it’s grainy, always warped beyond usual resin levels and feels very brittle to the touch.
I’d honestly only recommend it for models like their elementals which are quite chunky and won’t warp much.

I’d honestly say it’s a poor version of finecast, which really speaks volumes.

They need to scrap it and go pure resin and plastic (separately) or I can see it just getting worse.

The older PVC/Restic Mantic used for first ed Deadzone was pretty bad, but workable. I bought so heavily into the first KS that I still have a pile of it in my closet that will likely never see daylight, but I did get warbands built and painted of the original PVC Enforcers, Orks and Plague (a friend took the Rebs). It's better than finecast in that it's pretty indestructible, they bend instead of break and everything was slotted assembly, so once it was together and painted you didn't need to be careful with it. Cleaning all the mold lines was something else though, not fun in the least.

Keep a brass-wire brush on hand to scrub away the fuzzies left over from scraping mold lines, makes life MUCH easier. Mantic later changed to a different blend of PVC so the newer stuff with integral bases is much easier to work with. Fortunately Deadzone doesn't need many models to play

 Kalamadea wrote:
The older PVC/Restic Mantic used for first ed Deadzone was pretty bad, but workable. I bought so heavily into the first KS that I still have a pile of it in my closet that will likely never see daylight, but I did get warbands built and painted of the original PVC Enforcers, Orks and Plague (a friend took the Rebs). It's better than finecast in that it's pretty indestructible, they bend instead of break and everything was slotted assembly, so once it was together and painted you didn't need to be careful with it. Cleaning all the mold lines was something else though, not fun in the least.

Keep a brass-wire brush on hand to scrub away the fuzzies left over from scraping mold lines, makes life MUCH easier. Mantic later changed to a different blend of PVC so the newer stuff with integral bases is much easier to work with. Fortunately Deadzone doesn't need many models to play

True, the limited number of models needed does make the prospect more palatable.