Archon Studio – Masters of the Universe Battleground: Wave 6 – Evil Horde Faction: Leech, Scorpia & Mud Monster

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That post title long enough for you? It’s been pretty much a year since I finished or posted anything from Archon Studios’ MOTU game. The main reason for that being that I wasn’t really enjoying the models I had chosen to paint next.

Both of these models have strangely closed poses, despite being nicely details, well cast, multipart plastic models. Leech isn’t too bad – but he’s not good, while Scorpia is just fucking awful with her awkwardly-posed crossbow aimed at the floor and blocking off painting much of the model.

I more or less followed the box art with some research in looking at the toys to reference what I was doing. Since I don’t know anything about either of these characters, I found some odd contradictions on what Scorpia looked and acted like. Turns out that there was a recent-ish animated “reimagining” where the Netflix writers basically rewrote the character in the tiresome way that they always seem to treat legacy IP these days – I’d go on a rant here, but instead I’ll just say that I’m ironically glad that I’m not actually a MOTU fan and mostly picked this KS up from a bit of general recognition, the fact that the game got generally good reviews and that the models looked nice.

This shot above is an especially good look at how awkward Scorpia’s pose is. This is the main reason that this set took me pretty much a year to get painted – it was just a trio of models that was too easy to shove to the side and paint something else instead. It was actually “cleaning up” the painting desk that got these three done – so now they can get out of the way. It even led to me getting the next post’s models painted and now I can pick another small box or two to paint and move on out of the way – so very much a win overall!

19 thoughts on “Archon Studio – Masters of the Universe Battleground: Wave 6 – Evil Horde Faction: Leech, Scorpia & Mud Monster”

  1. Can totally see what you mean with the poses, but your painting of them is excellent and like the color choices.

    As for IP constantly changing it is a pain, GW do it constantly, almost as if to say up yours if you bothered to read the background in the first place ! LOL

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    • Thanks Dave. Yeah, I think there’s a big difference in how GW (usually) does these things compared with the weird shit done with places like Marvel and the MotU stuff where they just take the name of a character and race/gender swap them and possibly rewrite the character entirely.

      Kind of like what GW did between 1st and 2nd edition to characters like Russ, but with a very different and annoying motivation behind it.

      Star Wars being a kind of middle ground where they just nuked the old convoluted continuity and then started bringing it back – but then Acolyte started doing weird things with Yoda, Sidious, Conehead guy that broke the established lore (and the lore around Anakin) for no good reason.

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  7. Strange poses aside, the minis do have personality and stand out in a crowded field of fantasy miniatures. I really like the tones you chose for Scorpia as it looks pretty life-like. Perhaps the best news is that they’re done and you can move on to something more enjoyable!

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    • Thanks mate – I’m always trying to play with skin tones and vary them a little here and there.

      ok, unless it’s just visible faces/hands in which case the 2-3 models being painted together get the same treatment, but then the next pair or trio might get a slightly different variation.

      You’re not wrong about it being good news that they’re done! I’ve got another dozen or so “long-timers” queued up that I want to finish and move on beyond the rest of May’s models we’re still moving through, even while I assemble and start on more, new queue-jumpers!

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