Nemesis Dreadknights into the Fray

I have been down on Dreadknights ever since I got into this game. They look dumb, and their rules are bad. I even went so far as to custom make my GMNDK out of a Redemptor chassis so I could avoid the baby carrier design of the Dreadknight kit. The most common request I get from people is a tutorial on how I kitbashed that GMNDK, and I plan on writing one up with a step-by-step after Christmas. But for now I am going to talk about regular old Nemesis Dreadknights.

I've had one unpainted Dreadknight sitting on a shelf for the last two years. It bears the scars of my neophytic days in this hobby: super glue bubbles, mould lines, and a terrible unmagnetized loadout. I never wanted to paint him because he sucks and looks bad. Recently, however, I was suddenly hit with a strange desire to build a second Dreadknight. I bought another kit and cut the legs apart to give him a custom pose. That's the guy on the right in the picture above. He's kind of half stepping on that fallen column. I took some Terminator legs from the Paladins box to match his pose so that it actually looks like the pilot is properly operating his Dreadknight. I didn't know this when I modeled the first one (on the left), but the suits move in the same way as the pilot, like the Jaegers from Pacific Rim.

So I built that second one, liked the pose of the legs, and now I've started painting both of them. I primed and drybrushed the both of them and then set them aside for a couple weeks. I liked the pose of my new one, but the unit still sucked and I wasn't eager to finish painting a model that I wasn't planning on fielding. But Chapter Approved came out this last weekend and Nemesis Dreadknights dropped 50 points, which is fucking huge. I'm not sure if this gets them to a point where they might be viable, but that change excited me enough to start working on these two! I painted them up last night. Obviously they are still very much works in progress, but I really like how they're coming out. And after batch painting ten Paladins doing two models at once seems like nothing.

I will be fielding both of these mecha nerds in a game against Eldar tonight. Let's see how they do!