Goddamn that title is long. EDIT: I KNOW ITS KINGS OF WAR NOT LORDS OF WAR NOW I NEED TO REWRITE THIS WHOLE THING FUUUUUUCK

So anyway, I bought a bunch of hobby stuff this week and these Mantic orcs were the main thing among them. The rest were a bunch of pre-reformulation shield logo Citadel paints that were hanging around at the stores I got the other stuff from, a brush from Deserres’ (a very big art store chain in Canada) own brand to see if they were any good (they’re not) and a new wet palette cause I felt like it. In case you’re wondering.

Me writing this after unboxing those orcs literally this morning cause content schedule.

Sfdkcinvinmewosnmiuvoeqaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. (Apologies for the glitch, that’s just how I feel sitting down to write this).

So, these orcs. I’ve got terrain from Mantic but I’ve never bought their minis, so I have no idea what to expect. All I know is they’re cheap and a ripoff of Warhammer Fantasy designs so I bought them.

The box (see the main thumbnail picture) is nice, I like it when box art is just the painted minis. I don’t like art + minis combos, and I hate when there’s just art and no sign of the actual minis (coughASOIAFminisbyCMON). So there’s one point to Mantic.

Love how the bases were just chopped off a larger sprue (presumably of 20, as that’s the average number of minis in Lords of War sets) and thrown in here. Also get used to mid to bad quality photos, my phone broke so I’m using a shit old one.

Inside, you get two of the Kings of War plastic Orc Ax sprues (6 minis) and two Greatax sprues (4 minis), along with a bag of (a lot of) metal heads and axe-wielding arms to turn these basic sprues into Morax troops and a “command” sprue which is just some arms to hold sticks with unfortunate individuals roped to them, a few fancier axes and a couple gobbos. I really like this sculpt repurposing/customization, cause if you buy a proper Kings of War orc army it allows you quite a bit of flexibility among your different troops; the extra heads/arms allows you to create even more Moraxs from your standard Orc Axs, or you could go the opposite and just use half the sprues to beef up your Greatax or Ax troops rather then turning them into Moraxs. Even if you don’t play the game (I personally do not), I recognize the versatility.

Left to right: Orc Axs, Greataxs (with one head chopped off already, sorry), and the Morax metal arms and heads upgrade alongside the command sprue.

The minis themselves are surprisingly solid for the price. The plastic is a bit on the softer side, but not to the point where it’s rubbery or affects the quality of the sculpt. I vastly prefer this over the similarly slightly cheaper hard plastic used by Fantasy Flight Games and CMON, and it reminds me of Reaper (my favourite budget minis line). The minis tend to be fairly simple to assemble, with only a head and one or two arms being separate parts.
The only real criticism I have is that there’s NO BLOODY ASSEMBLY GUIDE. At first I thought this was fine given how obvious and simple to assemble these minis are, but then I realized that certain arms have to go with certain sculpts AFTER I assembled a pair of Greatax boys. To be fair, they were intended to be test models so I was expecting to have some screwups, but I didn’t anticipate having to rip the arms off both while the glue was drying and swap them.

The arms aren’t even put in the same part of the sprue as the mini they’re for to show they go together. The arms themselves aren’t even together! Both right arms are on one section, both lefts on another. Nothing to indicate they’re sculpt-specific.

Anyway, aside from that these are good minis for the price, basically what I was expecting. I’d recommend them to anyone from D&D players who need a bunch of orcs to Warhammer players who want cheap proxies. I’d give them a 8/10 for the price, but I’ll knock it down to a 7 cause of the lack of assembly instructions.

Painting these guys will be fun; There’s lots of metal on them, so I’m gonna take inspiration from the box art and do a bunch of rust on them to break up the solid mass of silver. I’m also keen to test out a new orc skin recipe I thought up lately that starts with the classic Warhammer bright green, but work the highlights up with yellowy olive greens instead of more bright green. I’ll paint these two test models, then do the proper colour scheme on the rest. I’ll do a full tutorial on them (which will work for any sort of orc minis, they’re all essentially the same) once I’ve got the colour scheme down. Expect updates in my future series of blogs I’m gonna do to fill the time in between my big tutorials and reviews, which’ll be stuff like paint recipes for whatever I’ve painted recently, short reviews of minor stuff I buy, and lots of gabbing about whatever I’m doing in the hobby at the moment.

Ok so this review, which was supposed to be a short review coupled with the paint recipes for a Skaven I painted entirely with Formula P3 paints to be the first of my new Hobby Blog series, has turned into a full size in depth review. I’m gonna just chop the Skaven off and turn this into its own post.

Leave a comment if you’ve got any questions, go join the Discord (lots of content creators + paint experts, it’s cool) https://discord.gg/ubtY3zErWM, bye.