Dark Eldar: Thinking about an army

As mentioned previously I picked up my copy of the Dark Eldar codex over the past weekend and have been greedily devouring it cover to cover like a starving jackal looking for marrow. A couple of list ideas have been flying around my head as well as cool hobbytastic ways that I could implement them. Since right now I'm forcing myself to think before leaping out and purchasing some models, I though that I'd talk a bit about some of them.

1. Jetbikes!

Like it says, jetbikes! The Reavers look incredibly awesome and offer anti-infantry and anti-tank all in one sleek package. Turboboosting to snipe some Long Fangs, then slowing down to pop a Land Raider... they just sound awesome. I'm a bit concerned with how fragile they are, but hopefully use of Blasters plus the Eldar jetbike move will keep them safe from small arms fire while tank popping and turboboosting to good locations should cover the rest. I'd probably fill out the rest of this list with Hellion troops and possibly a Ravager or three, giving me a good mix of anti-infantry and anti-tank.

Cool modelling idea: Ghost rider themed. Replace any open helmets with flaming skulls, give the Reavers flaming chains and have the Hellions either riding their standard boards or mod them to look more like Screamers of Tzeentch. Bonus points for making it compatible with the Chaos Daemons codex.

Alternatively I could just go with the standard models and take it as a painting skills builder, and probably throw in some mechanized support to go with it.


2. Dark Tyranids

Again with the multiple codices! This idea has some serious inspiration from Musing of a Metal Mind's Tyracrons (which you should totally check out!) Idea would be that some Haemonculi have captured some Tyranid specimens and are now loaning out their reprogrammed weapon-beasts to the highest bidder. Would probably be a Webway Portal army with Beastmasters, Talos and Chronos Parasites coming out to devour people. Throw in an Archon's Kabal mates as the shooty element/troops/webway portal deployers and you've got it. There's also an image in my head of a Tyranid Harpy as one of the Dark Eldar jetfighters that won't let go... And of course the icing on the cake would be being able to use it as a Tyranid codex army as well.

Cool modelling idea: pretty obvious, take Tyranid beasties and convert them into Haemonculus monsters. Probably throw some Nid bits onto Wracks to show off some experimentation. This would probably take a TON of modelling time, though, which I might not be able to do. I love me some crazy modeling projects, but since even my Ogres are taking tons of time to come to fruition I just dunno if I have it in me to do this admittedly AWESOME sounding project.

3. Standard Dark Eldar Raiding Party

Hey, the kits are already ridiculously pretty... why bother changing them? It would definitely offer me the fast, assault based army that I've always wanted to try and nothing is scarier than literal boat loads of Wyches in your face while Warriors and Trueborn smash you to pieces from range. I could probably also get to use Incubi here, which would mean some of the most badass models in the game would be MINE.

Cool modelling idea: this would probably be more as a painting skills builder army... which admittedly I would like to have. My painting techniques are ok, but I'd like to improve and working on challenging models would probably help me do that.

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So those are my potential ideas. I could probably combine numbers 2 and 3 together to some extent, which would let me practice my painting skills AND have a usable army while I work on my Tyranid beasties. But, I'll wait a bit first- still have to actually build my last 1000 points of Ogres, not to mention get started on some Christmas modelling projects...

What kind of ideas (crazy or not) do YOU have for a Dark Eldar army?

*images above are from Games-Workshop (except for the Tyracrons, which are from Musing of a Metal Mind but inspired by Games-Workshop)