Mega Miniatures - Making Reaper's Kickstarter Seem Rather Passé

www.megaminis.com

If there's any one thing that keeps people from jumping wholesale into miniatures gaming, it's the time and the money required to purchase miniatures. If you're not born to paint, it's a daunting enough task just to figure out what you need to buy, especially with every Tom, Dick, and Harry telling you that if you don't buy Citadel-branded paints and miniatures, you're deficient. Well, and I say this with the deepest amount of respect, fuck them in their Cheeto-encrusted lips. Games Workshop may be the most well-known miniatures company, but they are not remotely the best. Not remotely.

You see, there's maybe three hundred companies that produce high-quality miniatures, there's maybe ten companies that produce hobby paints that are made specifically for painting miniatures and other hobby items. So, there's a lot of selection and you can literally find anything you want, from a Fallout-style Super Mutant to a juvenile with a teddy bear to a naked zombie stripper. The best part is that you can get most of these miniatures relatively inexpensively, cast in metal or plastic, and you can pick and choose whatever you like.

Now, this rolls back around to me telling you what to buy, like those Tom, Dick, and Harry fellows, or at least I can recommend something that I think you'll like. Enter Mega Miniatures, a company that is 13 years old and has been producing made-to-order metal miniatures the whole time. The best part is that they have pretty much anything you can imagine, from skeletal cowboys to warmongering robots to the best dungeon dressing parts I've ever seen. Well, actually, the best part is that they're dirt cheap. The bad news is that the inimitable Johnny Lauck has decided he's had enough of competing with the Kickstarters, Games Workshops, and Reapers of the world. Apparently, people would prefer to pay ten dollars for a miniature they don't have the skill to paint appropriately than a two dollar miniature that's 80% as detailed and far more easily painted. 

As you may have read in my Pegasus Hobbies piece, I'm endeavoring to create a lovely wasteland set to play some Falloutesque battles on, and I came across Mega Miniatures during the research phase of the project. It baffles me that with all the miniature research I've done over the past three years that I hadn't given them a solid look. I've spent maybe two hundred dollars of late on several companies' miniatures, and I recently placed an order for about a hundred dollars in Mega Miniatures product. When you get them side by side, there's no doubt in my mind that I should've held off and spent the lion's share of that money with Mega, because their selection and quality is simply the most astounding value in the miniatures market that I've found.

They have an online store that has several ranges, such as sci-fi, fantasy, and scenery, as well as some very unique ranges, of which I bought more than my fair share; I got 28 miniatures packs (some of which contain multiple miniatures, so it's more like 35 miniatures total) for that $105.00, which included shipping. I'm talking about getting miniatures of the quality shown for around three dollars a piece. It's insane! I am simply unable to comprehend why more people haven't started getting some of these things based on the quality and price alone. Sure, they're not the same level of detail as something from the giants of sculpting, such as Murch or Copplestone, but they beat the piss out of RAFM and most of the Blue Moon line, for less than half the price.

In the end, if you're a miniatures enthusiast, you should really consider Mega Miniatures as a viable option for almost any game theme. Gangs, orcs, goblins, robots, dungeon furnishings...they have it all. The bad news in all of this is that you need to get in on the deals before December 31, 2013, or you're going to miss out.

Check them out at their website.

Some photos lifted from 52minis.blogspot.com, since the paint jobs on the Mega Miniatures website are less than indicative of the quality of the miniatures.