The Painter: Doug “Silks” Fazzani
The Army: Biel Tan Eldar
Points: About 4,000
Collected: Since 2019
The Past
I’d finished yet another disappointing tournament with my Adeptus Custodes where I did well in the painting competitions and had fun but lost almost all my games. I was running out of Golden boys to paint and I have a very bad habit of buying new armies when I’m bored. I chatted to a tournament buddy of mine about what to paint next and we came to the conclusion that if I wanted to actually do well I needed to pick Eldar (this was back in 2019 when Craftworlds Eldar with Ynnari backup were cleaning up. I decided to spend my break between rounds looking at the Warhammer World display for inspiration (I really recommend this!) and fell in love with the Biel Tan army they had painted up. I got home and spent a while looking up “net lists” and found the list Andrew Harrison used at the LVO. Sadly it was a 2000 point list while Warhammer World’s tournaments were 1750 and tuned to work with other craftworlds but I was set on using Biel Tan as I wanted to paint green. After some fiddling I had what was probably an ok list. Lots of fliers and bikes with psychic support. Then I put a Wraithknight in it because I am a sucker for gorgeous models with bad rules apparently.
After a fairly quick but very intense month or so I was ready to take the list to the next Warhammer World tournaments where I had much better results including doing well in the painting competitions again…
I excitedly booked a ticket for Blood and Glory, my first ever ITC event. I spent quite a long time making a display board (my first ever one) and added a Hemlock to make the army up to 2000 points. Hobby wise I got lots of good feedback (and came second in the best painted I think?) and met Wings for the first time (who was very enthusiastic about his Wraith Knight using all sorts of stratagems and rules I didn’t have access to due to being Biel Tan). I played against the new Marines codex for the first time and it went horribly, horribly wrong. I performed so badly that I went home quite demoralised about what the future held.
The Present
After Blood and Glory I decided to once again follow the “net lists” and go tank heavy. Once again though, I ruined it by sticking with Biel Tan and also adding in a bunch of Forgeworld models I’d always wanted to paint – the Scorpion and the Warp Hunter. I took it to its first Warhammer World tournament earlier this year and did quite well in painting and even not too bad in winning games, but felt like the list could do better with practise so was all set to take it to tournaments for the rest of the year… Oh well, maybe 2021
The Future
I really want to get in some more play with the list I used earlier this year before I add any more to it. However, things could change a lot depending on what the new Forgeworld books bring to my beloved Scorpion. I’m thinking very hard about doing some Shadow Spectres next, but I’ll probably just buy a Phantom Titan or something stupid instead because I’m an idiot.
The Models
The main standouts from the individual models are the bigger things. I’ll admit that I haven’t painted the infantry to the same standard and that bothers me a bit (so they generally get shoved to the back of the army when I’m displaying it.
First of all, here’s my beloved Wraith Kngiht. He’s fully magnetised so he can be terrible in combat, terrible in shooting or have a terrible invulnerable save. Brilliant. He can totally pose though, which is important.
Then there’s the fliers. I love these models and would gladly paint more. The highlights are really easy to place and the thorns make them much more interesting. I’ve done each plane with different white striping, some of which works better than others.
A nice combination of the fliers curbs with the silliness of the Wraithknight is my Scorpion. I think this may be my favourite model ever. It certainly gets lots of compliments on the table before people call me a dick for using it. Turns out that pointing at something and saying “yeah, you can just remove that unit” won’t necessarily win you friends.
The rest of the tanks were all painted in one go, with the white parts left off for airbrushing seperately. At one point I had a massive box full of very similar looking Eldar guns / antennae all painted white and had to then look at pictures on GW’s website to work out which one fitted which model. You may notice they all have bases, this is mainly for painting as when you have an all tank army you have very few bases to establish a theme on!
Finally I have the squads of jetbikes. I used brass rod on oval bases instead of plastic flying stands which is a complete life saver when you have 18 of them and try to move them about. The squads are split into 1 stripe and 2 stripe squads which makes me feel quite clever.
Next Time: Who knows?
I have a terrible habit of buying a huge army, fully painting it, playing it a few times and then selling it on so what armies I actually have tends to fluctuate quite wildly!
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