Building My New Vampire Counts the Cheapskate Way- Trading

The new Vampire counts pictures went up just after I started this blog
and I was prepared ... I had been reading Warseer for the past few months and following the Vampire rumors...by the end of November I started looking through my unused armies and noticed my Skaven were sitting around gathering dust, and I had no enthusiasm to paint them... and really never had. Perfect trade bait...but I had to act fast, before everyone wanted VC...what follows is a guide to acquiring miniatures with minimal cash.

Trade 1 (Local Friend): Check with your friends- Though I had an ad on bartertown...my first instinct was to check with my local gaming buddies...and sure enough one of them wanted to trade undead for my newest skaven:

He got: 20 New Stormvermin, 20 Clan Rats, A Couple of 6th ed rat ogres, 15 of my 4th edition plague monks, a few old metal assasins, a couple of ratling guns, and an old style warp lightning cannon!

I got: Corpse Cart, 20 ghouls, arms/heads/legs for 30 more ghouls, 10 grave guard

Total Spent: 0
Retail Cost of Goods Acquired: 116

My grave guard (Ebay)Thinking I was going to be done acquiring grave guard I ordered 20 more grave guard on ebay for 50 bucks...assembled without bits but still a respectable 41 percent off retail....

Total Spent: 50
Retail Cost of Goods Acquired: 200

Rounding out the Ghouls (Hoard O' Bits): Since I had bits (arms and heads) for 30 ghouls, I ordered 30 sets of ghoul bodies and legs from Hoard O'Bits for 40 dollars (they have an ebay site and an online direct site the direct site is a little cheaper

Total Spent: 90
Retail Cost of Goods Acquired: 275

Trade 2(bartertown.com): While waiting for my ghouls bits, I traded the elves from my old IOB box and an NIB pegasus knight (I wasn't planning this but I had the extra models) for 30 skeletons and 8 grave guard...after compensating my trade partner for some bits that were missing from my shipment...and paying for shipping:

Total Spent: 121
Retail Cost of Goods Acquired: 383.6

Trades 3 & 4 (bartertown.com): Were actually sales...I had a bunch of 6th edition clanrats (something like 170) and I sold them all for 68 bucks+shipping (someone got the better part of an army for under a hundred bucks!) and this brought me some very good karma in my next trade

Total Spent: 53
Retail Cost of Goods Acquired: 383.6

Trade 5 (bartertown.com): Major score! I traded a some Bret Knights of the Realm and a second pegasus knight for 10 grave guard...the person I traded with decided to just send me their entire VC collection (I will take every spare Bret Model I can find and send them as a gift)

18 GG Assembled10 GG Brand new

15 Skeletons assembled

10 skeletons on sprue (missing legs but thats only like 10 bucks)

1 varghulf

1 corpse cart

3 necrarchs

female vampire

new necro

Krell

a bunch of ghoul bits (don't need but hey)

Fur cloak vampire on foot

Old mannfred no horse

Now I am not going to count every model on here for retail acquired as I would never have bought some of these but even by conservative standards this is what goods acquired looked like: 120GG+65 Skeletons+35 Varghulf+25 Corpse Cart+20 New Necro+ 30 Vampires=~295

Total Spent: 53
Retail Cost of Goods Acquired: 678.6

Trades 6&7 (Bartertown.com) Feeling flush I bought a metal varghulf and a metal mounted mannfred for 56$ on Bartertown

Total Spent: 109
Retail Cost of Goods Acquired: 678.6

Trade 8 (Barter town.com) I traded a unit of chaos marauder horsemen, 4 old metal phoenix guard, an old box of space marine veterans (the original one) for 70 zombies!
Also I need to buy legs for one of my skeleton sprues for another 10 bucks

Grand Total Spent: 119
Grand Total of Retail Cost of Goods Acquired: 763.6

I'm still trying to sell a few items to pay for supplies (magnetic bases, trays, I ordered for the army, flock, primer...) but this will be part of another article

All told...I will be fielding an army of
66 Grave Guard
65 Skeletons
50 Ghouls
70 zombies
2 Varghulfs
2 Corpse Carts
A Bunch of vampires/characters all for under 120 dollars and a bunch of miniatures I did not need/want!

I'll discuss lessons learned and how they apply to people not swimming in miniatures, in the next article!

Don't Waste Money On Carrying Cases

Thought your warhammer army was expensive? Try buying storage for them! I often go to one of the local stores to paint, and I usually don't interfere when the staff are trying to sell someone new to the hobby something they don't need. But nothing makes tempts me to butt-in more than when I see a staff-member circling some poor newb taking minis out of his shoebox like a vulture..."for only 99 dollars plus tax you can store 120 of your minis" (but not tanks that costs another hundred bucks)...

Think about that, retail price for a rank and file GW miniature is 2.48 + tax..., now you have to add another 90 cents (about a third of the models prices) just to store them? No waaaaay!

The online retailers are no better...Battle-Foam is even more expensive than GW, and Army-Transport isn't much cheaper. Besides, miniature cases have a lot of problems too

The trays either custom conform to your models...but then you can only use them for those models

or

They have those small slots...like gw cases and are the death of standard bearers and assault marines and devastators alike.

Also there is the problem of storing the foam trays, as they don't really stack well and you have to buy cases for all your foam trays...but if you have multiple armies this makes buying for each army kind of inefficient. and even if you do create say a shelf to store all the foam trays you have to pack and unpack your carrying case every time you want to swap out armies.

The other thing is (at least for my Army-Transport bag) is that adding and removing modular trays from a bag tends to cause you to squish them and that can break models in and of itself

So what is my solution then?:

Ladies and gentlemen...I submit to you the humble GWCheapskate army transport system. This article will cover the 40k version... and a future one will cover Fantasy (which is a little different because you want to keep your models ranked up).

Materials:
1 28 Quart plastic box (something like this...note the price there is for a box of ten...but you can pick them up individually locally).
2 or 3 Large Bath Towels depending on how many layers you want (note you can also use eggshell foam)
1 Scissors to cut the bath towels

Obviously you can pick the container that suits you best, I just find that 28 stores 1500-2500 pretty well and is just high enough to store my high elf dragon standing up. One important thing to note is make sure the box you pick is high enough to store your tallest model.

One other important thing is make sure the towels are thin but not too fluffy as pointy things get caught in really fluffy towels.

I recommend going to your local Target or Walmart for this stuff...(Hardware stores won't have the towels). Dollar stores may also work, but I have only recently discovered the Dollar General near my house so I will update.

Once you have the materials...cut one bath towel to the size of the bottom of your storage tray (with about a 1 inch overlap) and line the bottom.

Cut the other towels with the idea of putting miniatures in layers (and vehicles taking up one section at the bottom in single a layer).

Then simply lay your miniatures out heaviest/sturdiest on the bottom
Lightest/most fragile on top.

Finally, cut a towel to cover to the size of the top of the box (usually the top has more surface area than the bottom in these types of boxes), and cover your minis with it this prevents them from bouncing up and down in your trunk!

There you go... your 15-20 dollar miniature carrying case. Feel free to mail me a check for the difference :-)

In the next article I'll have some pictures of my cases and how I store them

The Five Laws of the Warhammer Cheapskate

Being a Warhammer cheapskate isn't just knowing a set of tricks, it's a way of thinking! An intellectual discipline if you will. To start people in the right frame of mind here are the first five laws. There are just five to start with, I will add to them as I think of them.

1. Most, but not all, hobby supplies are a scam.

2. All miniature transport products are a scam.

3. It is best to have less of what you want than more of what you don't want.

4. Metal can always be stripped, plastic can usually be stripped, resin can sometimes be stripped, finecast can never be stripped.

5. Paying cash for brand new official warhammer miniatures from Games Workshop is NOT the only way to build your army.

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My Credentials

I am the warhammer cheapskate...pleased to meet you. We all know this is not a cheap hobby, and with this blog I hope to pass on some of the things I learned to make the hobby just a little bit less expensive.

So in this post, I hope to explain where I got my experience, and how I will use it to benefit you!


First of all, I've been playing a long time. How long? Will I was painting at a store...and I kid asked me what I thought of Space Marine? I proceeded to tell him that I liked Space Marine more than 40K at the time, and had a huge squat army, and wished I hadn't sold it off before Epic Armageddon came out. 5 minutes later I realized he was talking about the video game, which was also pretty good!

Second, I love Warhammer, and play it every chance I get, and I have really explored the Warhammer universes over the years. I've owned every fantasy army except dark elves and dwarfs at least once, and have had 5 different 40K armies. I've owned Blood Bowl, BFG, Space crusade, WFRPand have read a ton of Warhammer books. So I know the subject really really well! Moreover I had to paint and store all my stuff over the years and I know the possible options for this aspect pretty well as well. But I am not just a fluff bunny. I play competitively (go to tournaments) and I win my share of games...

Third, I am the kind of person that is always trying to improve things and I'm willing to try different things to do things better, cheaper, faster even if it means I occasionally got burned (and I have)

Of course, one of the things about doing something for a long time, I've been at it for over 20 years, is that you forget things over time! So this blog will serve as my place to write down all I have learned about how to do things in this hobby better and cheaper, and to write down the new stuff I learn and you teach me.