Finding an ogre for my Stormcast Eternal Blood Bowl team

Following up on my Stormcast Eternals Blood Bowl team reaching thirteen completed models, I have been trying to narrow down a proxy model to use as the equivalent of an ogre.

As I’m intending to use the Stormcast as a human team proxy in Blood Bowl, an ogre is going to be pretty important to have available either from the beginning or as the team grows.

But which model will fit to provide suitably ogre-level differentiation from all the already-large Stormcast Eternals?

In my last team update, I wondered aloud about a few options and honestly haven’t got a great deal further forward in terms of actually choosing a winner.

I have begun to test out some of the contenders though, so I thought I’d document my process a little along the way.

Finding the biggest Stormcast Eternal

My first preference was to look for the largest Stormcast Eternal model proper, in the hope it would have enough scale difference to read as an ogre-level character.

I’ve already painted myself (no pun intended) into a bit of a corner in this regard, having converted some quite large models like Yndrasta and Averon Stormsire as normal players.

Originally marking the Aventis Firestrike-on-foot model as an ogre proxy, that quickly felt wrong. The model is certainly tall, but doesn’t carry the right brutish-ness for an ogre.

Annihilators

The obvious bulky Stormcast are the Annihilators (or the older Paladins: Retributors/Decimators/Protectors). Having a rummage through my trays of minis, I found the largest Annihilator I could but it still didn’t feel like it quite held the presence compared to other Stormcast that an ogre does to normal human players.

Then I remembered…

Rostus Oxenhammer

The Blacktalons set includes the beast that is Rostus Oxenhammer.

Comparing the already-primed Rostus mini I had against the Blood Bowl (BB) ogre his height and bulk felt much better, to the point that I went online and sourced a second Rostus copy to convert.

Above you can see the three: standard Rostus, converted Rostus and a BB ogre. Having removed the hammer, he does lose a little of the overall impression of weightiness but still works quite well size-wise — at least compared to the BB ogre.

Compared to the rest of the Stormcast team, he’s big but still not totally sure big enough.

I did play with the idea of swapping the head for an ogre head and perhaps even the arms, but the proportions don’t work which only reinforced my concern that he’s not quite big enough.

So: still an option but not 100% sold just yet.

Try an animal

My next option was to give up on the Stormcast Eternals themselves and look for something else that’s bigger than a Stormcast but might vaguely fit with their lore.

The Stormcast Eternals have a number of gryph- animals in their forces, from smaller gryph-hounds up to huge gryph-stalkers.

Being four-legged, none of these is realistically ideal but the idea of the Stormcast bringing along a gryph-beast for a bit of extra brute force felt like it could work in the silliness that is Blood Bowl.

Gryph-charger

Having played with options on minicompare, one of the gryph-chargers from the Stormstrike Chariot set looked a reasonable size if I could find a way to fit it on a 40mm base (the realistic maximum to be workable on a Blood Bowl board, though I could perhaps go to 50mm at a push).

Using a bit of blu tac to temporarily mount the gryph-charger to a smaller base, up on its hind legs, the general size works alright. Lifted up enough, not too much of the model sticks out in any one direction so that it could feasibly work on the tabletop in amongst other players in adjacent grid squares.

The model itself is of course designed to be running forwards horizontally however, so I needed something to help sell the effect.

Dropping an Imperial Nobility lineman onto the base under the gryph-charger’s feet worked surprisingly well in terms of proportion and ‘scene’. Sigmar might not approve of stomping other humans though, so I dug around and found an UGNI Tomb King proxy player I had bought a while back.

This one is starting to feel like it could work. The mini diorama of trampling a skeleton — representative of Nagash — works well I think, although I do also like the proportions with the fallen nobility lineman so I may try some other models to go underfoot too.

A remaining concern is the modelling of the legs on the gryph-charger: they’re a relatively simple/low-detail sculpt and raising up like this it becomes way more obvious. I’m sure once painted it can work just fine, but it did prompt me to have another look through the Stormcast catalogue for alternatives.

Dracoline?

The Evocators on Dracolines set is one I had always liked but not bought, then with AoS 4th edition removing the Sacrosanct chamber I parked the idea.

Scrolling back through Stormcast sets though, one of the Dracoline models looked absolutely great in terms of pose as a possibility for my ogre: it’s leaping forward with front paws out in attack. Way more dynamic than the gryph-charger which is just meant to be pulling a chariot.

Another quick ebay search and I lucked out, finding a complete set of three Evocators on Dracolines built but unpainted, with the lucky bonus of a fourth still on sprue.

Even better, the spare was the exact model I wanted for my ogre proxy!

Trigger pulled, it arrived impressively quickly earlier this week, whence I was quickly disappointed to realise quite how big these dracoline models are.

I rapidly gave up on the dracoline idea but a couple of days later and writing this article, I decided to have one more look and to take a better photograph than the one above to show the difference in scale.

Now, I realise the scale is getting a bit ridiculous at this point, but what is Blood Bowl about if not being ridiculous when it makes things fun?

Looking again at the dracoline model, I can suddenly see the possibility of it reared up steeply like this, with the rider kept on (the legs are part of the dracoline model, so that was always going to be a constraint), carrying a ball in his hand instead of a staff.

I’ll be trying that little kitbash shortly I think.

Definite possibility! 

… also definite possibility it’s a stupid idea and that it won’t even balance on a small enough base. We’ll see.

Ogor: the bigger ogre

Lastly (for now??), my delving into minicompare a couple of weeks ago also turned up the possibility of kitbashing an Ogor Mawtribes Tyrant.

This one’s a harder story to tell consistently as part of a Stormcast team — the Ogor Mawtribes hail from the Destruction grand alliance rather than Order like the Stormcast, while the Stormcast Eternal helmet trophy on the Tyrant doesn’t help! — and probably an even harder kitbash to pull in line visually with the rest of the team.

That said, it’s at least an actual ogre and one that scales correctly relative to Stormcast eternals in the same way the BB ogre does with humans, while the ogre does also stand apart from the humans in the core team.

This is an idea I had discarded but, again, working through my thoughts for this post today I decided to just get one anyway. 

At worst, it obviously won’t work and instead I’ve got what is a really cool miniature in its own right.

Which will win out?

Given the rate at which I’m still changing my mind on this, I have no idea which model I’ll end up choosing as my ogre.

There’s a good chance I follow through on kitbashing and painting more than one of them and give myself more options.

As of right now though, I’m most enthused again by the dracoline idea if I can make it work.

Time to stop writing and go kitbash a dracoline…