Tag Archives: wasteland

Nov 22 2021

Mythic Legions (Wasteland): Cassia by The Four Horsemen

It’s Mythoss Monday again, and I thought I’d let it roll with more of the Wasteland Wave! This was not a large assortment of figures, and since I skipped the Masters of the Universe homages, I’ve actually only got two more figures here to look at. Today we’ll check out Cassia!

According to her bio, Cassia is something of a disaffected wanderer, who abandoned her faction and is looking to hook up with the House of the Noble Bear. She’s praised as a veteran of some of Mythoss’ bloodiest battles, making her one dangerous warrior. Cassia’s got a lot going on with several display options, so let’s get started!

Here she is out of the box with her shoulders on, and repurposing a good deal of the body we last saw a while back on Juno, including that scalloped breast armor. From there on, her armor is a hodge-podge collection that looks like it’s been scavenged from piles of dead on the battlefield. She’s got something of a knightly belt with hip plates and a studded leather scale piece hanging down front and center, meanwhile her legs are armored from knee to toe in the rough and jagged Orc-type armor. What I find most distinctive is her use of two different style shoulder pieces, which sort of match the bracer on each opposite arm.

I’m not a huge fan of the mismatched shoulders, so I’ll likely just display her with one or the other, and use one of her three sword belts as a shoulder strap. And going with this option also allows her to wear her sword on her back, with the hilt peeking up over the bare shoulder. The rest of the armor looks great and offers a paint deco as diverse as the pieces themselves. The hips are silver with blue accents, the lower legs are black. Her left bracer is copper and her right is brown with copper studs and painted silver buckles.

Cassia comes out of the box with a sugar loaf style helmet, which we last saw on the female Templar, Delphina. I like the sculpt a lot, and here it’s recreated with a blackened iron look, copper reinforcing strips crossing at the eye slits, and silver painted rivets. It does, however feel a little out of place here. But then again, I think that’s the whole point. It’s just another piece of scavenged armor for her collection.

The alternate head suits her a lot more in my opinion, even if I’m not quite as fond of this sculpt as I am the full helmet. Oh, it’s not bad at all, but I think the exposed part of the face is a little soft. I do, however, like the copper finish on the helmet itself and the very realistic looking horns, which can be attached in a number of different ways. I also dig the ponytail that attaches to the helmet and spills out the back. How does she get all that hair tucked into the other helmet? It wonder!

If you’ve read my last couple of Mythic Legions reviews, you may remember me griping about how some of those figures didn’t feel like they came with as much stuff as I was used to getting. Well, Cassia here is an example of how some of these releases are loaded with accessories. I mean, we already got the extra head and three sword belts, but how about three weapons to go with her too! The first of which is a damn fine bearded ax. The graceful shaft has a sculpted wood finish, and the middle of the ax has a hammered copper look to it. This is a cool weapon, which she can wield either single or double-handed.

Next up, she has a rather crude looking scimitar, which we last saw with one of the Orcs. I’m happy to see this accessory again, because it’s just so damn distinctive. The grip and crossguard are sculpted to look like either claws or teeth, and the well-worn, nicked blade has a clipped point and a hole punched near the tip, perhaps to lighten the weight of the weapon. The swell in the blade makes it a little tough to pass through the loop on the belts, but it hangs pretty well if you just thrust it on the inside of the belt.

The final weapon in Cassia’s arsenal is the massive war hammer. This bruiser of a weapon turned up a lot in the initial assortment of Mythic Legions figures and while I may have been getting a bit tired of it back then, it’s cool to see it make an appearance. Cassia looks mighty and fierce wielding it, even if it does probably weigh almost as much as she does! The copper paint looks very nice, and matches some of her armor, and as always the sculpt on this piece is stellar.

And if all these goodies weren’t enough, Cassia also comes with a fur cape, which is an incredible little garment. I’m not sure how TFH made this look so damn good, but it genuinely looks like they shrunk down a bear pelt. It feels so soft and luxurious! It’s fitted with a hole to pass through the neck, so she can wear it sort of like cape, but it’s big enough to wrap all the way around her for those chilly Mythoss nights.

Cassia may be quite conspicuous as a mix-and-match figure, but I do enjoy how they leaned into it to make her look like someone who trades up armor as she finds it. I often imagine that your average warrior in a fantasy campaign would be constantly finding better gear to loot, and that this patchwork appearance would be the result, especially for a warrior like Cassia who has cast off her previous allegiances. She’s a great figure and comes with plenty of cool stuff! Indeed, there are enough display options here to create two distinct characters!

Nov 15 2021

Mythic Legions (Wasteland): Argemedes by The Four Horsemen

Welcome to the second installment of the still new and fresh Mythoss Monday! And it’s all the more timely, since The Four Horsemen just revealed pre-orders for yet another wave of Mythic Legions ready to girt on their swords and do battle with my bank account. I’m still far behind in my Mythic Legions reviews, picking through the now impressive history of releases, and today I’ve come up with Argemedes the Cyclops!

The Siege at Bjorngar assortment introduced the Ogre-sized figures to the realm of Mythoss. Not as large as the Trolls, but still standing tall above the regular-sized figures, we initially got three of these big bois: Kkurzog, The Ogre Legion Builder, and Bolthor the Tower. Argemedes followed soon after in the Wasteland assortment to round out the quartet. Unlike the regular Mythic Legions releases, these fellas come in window boxes, which are collector friendly and have some very nice wrap-around artwork!

Argemedes mixes things up a bit in that he is a Cyclops! Perhaps, he’s a smaller, distant cousin of the larger mono-eyed Brontus, The Arena Troll from The Coliseum Wave. Mythic Legions is a line that is built around mixing, matching, and repainting parts, and while it manages to achieve a pretty good amount of diversity, I think the parts sharing is probably most obvious in these Ogres sized figures. I’m not knocking them for it, but I just find it a lot more noticeable here if you gather them all together. If you stand Argemedes next to Kkurzog, you can see there are more differences in the paint scheme than the actual sculpt. They share the exact same bodies, hands, and feet, as well as the same wrist bracers. chest harnesses, and leg armor. The belts are nearly identical too, with only the disc in the center being different. Argemedes also has a much thicker and larger barbarian diaper to hide his trouser cyclops.

And while the recycled bodies really stand out here, I still think they did a nice job on the repainted bits for Argemedes. He’s given a sort of blue-gray skin with a paler shade in the chest. The armor bits are generally darker, emphasizing more blacks than browns, less silver, and mixing up some of the coppery bits. I have to say I’m still blown away by all the fine detail in the armore pieces. The texturing makes the leather bits look like real leather, and the hammered finish on the studs, plates, and buttons, is just so damn fantastic. There’s a little overspray of bone paint on the plates between his legs, but that’s the only place I can find fault in the paint quality. The rather ornate scrollwork pattern on the belt disc looks great, although this piece has now been used on three out of the four Ogres, making Kkurzog’s belt the most unique of the bunch. At least the wrist bracers are removable, so you can mix things up by removing one or both if you want to make these guys look different. Personally, I think they look too good to take off! I especially love how all the little straps, buckles, and fixtures are sculpted and painted.

Argemedes does have a brand new head, which makes him and his one big eye rather unique. The lower structure of his face is still very Ogre like, with the flat nose, broad mouth and prominent tusks. Maybe one of the Ogres got busy with Brontus and Argemedes was the result! He’s got craggy skin around his single blood-orange eyeball. The paintwork on the head is excellent, with some nice shading and the skin changing from blue to a creamy yellow around his nose and lower jaw. I also really dig the paint and sculpt that went into those tusks.

The helmet is a close fitting skullcap with thin cheek guards, which drop down in front of his pointed ears. The mohawk of boney spikes looks great and matches the bones that protrude from the arm and leg armor rather well. The helmet is removable, and it can even be worn by Kkurzog or the Ogre Legion Builder if you like. This was a nice surprise, I had expected it to be either part of the head sculpt or permanently attached. I prefer the figure with the helmet on, but the bald pate that can be seen with the helmet off also gives the portrait a lot of personality.

For me, the only real disappointing thing about Argemedes is that he comes with the same poleax that we’ve seen a few times with The Ogres already. It’s not a bad weapon, and I love how the shaft can be changed around to be different lengths, but when you’re reusing this much figure, it seems only fair to give him a brand new weapon. It’s not like any new weapon designed for this guy wouldn’t be used again and again further on down the line. It would have also been cool to give him some kind of crude shield. With that having been said, the ax head is still a beautiful sculpt and it does suit the big guy rather well.

I do love this figure class, and making one of them a cyclops was a great idea! Argemedes is another welcome addition to my Mythic Legions shelves, and he looks great in the back towering over some of the other figures. With that having been said, The Four Horsemen really need to invest in some new armor for this body if they’re still going to be making use of it. There just seems to be more of a variety of paint options with the smaller figures to make them work better with recycled parts. Not to mention these bigger guys cost more, so it would be nice to get some more bang for my buck. Based on some pictures, it looks like TFH are addressing this in future releases with new armor pieces and such, so it will be cool to see what they come up with.