Ten Thunders Auxiliaries?

Misaki is able to transform a number of Outcast models into Ten Thunders models through her hiring rules. In addition, with the release of Storm of Shadows, Ten Thunder's Brothers have moved from their book 3 standing as Outcasts to be fully Ten Thunders now. I have a small set of Mercenary outcasts but I do not use them much. In addition, I have never picked up a Viktoria crew, so am missing out on a couple of the typical mercenaries that are seen. Namely, I do not have Taelor or Hans, both of whom become Ten Thunders with Misaki as the master. When I found out what Misaki would be able to include as Ten Thunders from the currently released models, I went out and picked up a couple Outcast's that I had not grabbed previously. Namely, the Ten Thunders Brothers and the Ronin.

On the other hand, in preparation for my dive into the world of Ten Thunders, I painted up a full set of 3 Ten Thunders Brothers and 3 Ronin. Both work very well with Misaki, and the Brothers work well with any Ten Thunders crew.No one who has played Malifaux for a while says the Ronin are bad models. They are very mobile, ignore armor with thier melee attack, and have a very decent melee attack in general. Overall, they work really well and fit nicely into the overall Misaki play style. When I grabbed the blister of Ronin I actually went out on Google images and did some searches to figure out how I wanted them to look. I found some nice examples which I decided to put a mild twist on and mimic. I am particularly happy with the purple haired Ronin, and with the loose-shirt cowboy hat Ronin. The shirt color on the cowboy hat Ronin came out just as I wanted, more linen than white.

That brings us to the Ten Thunders Brothers. These guys have a lot of character and are fantastic 5 point models for Ten Thunders Crews. They have decent Melee, bring along the same Melee Expert ability that the Ronin do, but then add in something more. These boys can be taken with any 10T crew, not just Misaki, and they bring Companion to the crew. That plug-in companion ability creates some very interesting and powerful combinations overall, allowing things like the Torekage's ability to use their swap for a potentially nasty Alpha Strike. From a model standpoint, while I enjoyed painting them I did get a bit frustrated. The masks are not uniform across the models and its a bit tough to figure out what was a half mask vs a full mask vs something else. I am really happy with the colors I got on the straw hat for the one guy, and like the whole look and idea of the massive barrel hammer on the other. I have found myself leaving Hammer-brother at home and bringing the other two in my case however. This has more to do with fit than anything else. These three models certainly hit a time in my painting when I ran into a wall of frustration and just decided they were "good enough for table top".  I think there is a whole lot more that could be done with them to improve their look over my paint job.

So there you have it, the 10T Auxiliaries. I still have a bunch of other pictures to go, with the plan to get them posted through the end of this week and into next. My gaming is a bit slow this week with some family events going on, so no battle reports for a while. I have moved over to playing Mei Feng, and have my first handful of games in with her. I will aim to get a battle report up soon, from some of the upcoming games until the end of November. Our Winter Achievement league has just started up, so there is a fair amount of incentive to get some battle reports posted (they are worth achievement points).