Review: the new Mantic Rabble sprue

Currently, i’m painting up an army of goblins. Once, I vowed never to paint an ugly Mantic goblin anymore, but that was before the new Mantic goblins were released. In this blog post, I’ll review these models.

The goblins can be built as either rabble, sharpsticks and archers. A regiment box consists of two sets of two sprues which has enough options for ten goblins and two mawpups. The sprues look like this:

As you can see, the sprue contains enough hand weapons, spears, shield offhands and bows/arrows to build each of the three options. There’s a dozen different heads and two sets of five bodies.

The quality

The quality of these models is way, way better than the older miniatures. They are clean and crisp models in which all three weapons look natural. The models are hard plastic which is wonderful for converting. On the right, you see a model built as rabble and below another one built as rabble (though the 2nd hand weapon is a converted spear).

As you can see, the models are clean and have natural poses.

What’s good?

• Cheap goblins (at least Mantic prices)
• They convert well with other plastics
• they look well
• with a single set, you can build archers, spearmen and rabble
• two mawpups included

What’s not so good?

• The sprue consists of five goblin torsos times two.
• The weapons also come in sets of five spears and five handweapons.
• Also the shields come in five different varieties.
• This means that in a horde of rabble or sharpsticks the same weapons, shields and torsos will come in eight dupplicates. For the torsos, I’m not too bothered, but the limited amount of weapons and shields bother me. This means that conversions are not only easy, but almost neccesary. As you can see in the pictures below, my rabble are heavily converted, mainly by using GW plastics.

The verdict

If you’re not a stranger to conversions, these goblins are great models. They are a huge improvement over the previous models and I loved painting up more than two hordes.

The models convert well, so I used them too to bolster my luggit regiments by giving them two-handed weapons and painting them red.

They are well-worth spending time and money on and a testament to Mantic’s new standards.

I just wonder why they opted to fill out the sprue with two of the same weapons and torsos? Wouldn’t it be possible to include ten different weapons and torsos on the same sprue instead of doubling up?

Up: converted rabble

Right: Luggits, converted from the same sprue. The greatsword has the following inscription “sigmar’s wrath”, so it’s an impressive (cross-universe) piece of looting!