80s Combat Cards!

Inspired by Orlygg's recent article about Citadel Combat Cards, I decided to add my own thoughts about these great little GW products. For a long time I only owned the Chaos, Goblinoids and Dwarfs decks, but this year I decided to acquire the rest. So after some months of Evilbay scouring, I managed to buy the Warriors, Monsters and Space War decks for reasonable to moderate prices.

My original three decks at the top, with my recent acquisitions below.

I've spent many long moments looking over the beautiful images on these cards, and since I started buying some of the old school miniatures, I've also painted some to match the ones on the cards. I know some people might wonder, what's the point of copying them? Why not just paint them your own way? Well personally, I really like the way most of these models have been painted, and it's just my homage to these legendary miniatures. But also, while my painting standard is reasonably good, I quite often struggle to think up colour schemes for some models. So rather than just leaving a model on the painting desk for months (or years!) I just paint my own version of the scheme that's already been created. Two of these are shown below:

Jakun of the Claw

Ulrich Elfeater

But there is one other thing I'd like to cover while on the topic of Combat Cards. I also have a pack of some later cards released, I think, in about 1999...

I think they made decks for several races, but I only picked up the Chaos Warriors set. Incidentally, I never had to buy these, I got them for free! Many years ago, my local GW was having a clear-out and they had a whole box of these decks that they were giving away. Obviously they hadn't really sold many, and from the look of the actual cards, it's not hard to see why:

Unlike the unique models and multiple stats on the 80s cards, these look, well, relatively bland by comparison. The models are just some of the generic chaos models from the period where all creativity and colour was removed, and there's only one stat that doesn't even have a name! The "Top Trumps" rules were abandoned and some rules involving creating "warbands" consisting of several cards of the same border colour were introduced. All in all, much less exciting. I don't think there were any other attempts to make combat cards after these, probably owing to the failure of these ones to sell.

So anyone else got any of these later cards? Were there any other attempts by GW to make combat cards that I don't know of? Anyone else managed to complete their sets of 80s cards? Or did you have them all when they were sold in GW shops?

Blood Angels!

Having completed quite a number of models for my retro RT Crimson Fists marines, I've decided to also build a squad of Blood Angels and later, a unit of Silver Skulls as well. So far I've completed five Blood Angels, with a goal of having ten each of the Blood Angels and Silver Skulls.

This is the squad so far:

Sergeant with the traditional bolt pistol and chainsword:

Brother marine with Bolter and chainblade attachment:

Brother marine with Bolter and combat attachment:

Finally, two more marines with Bolters:

I've got four Silver Skulls currently in the works, and then I can think about putting together the rest of the Blood Angel squad, including special and heavy weapons!